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CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



ES IN 
EVOLUTION 

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
TOWN PLANNING MOVEMENT 

AND TO THE 

STUDY OF CIVICS 



BY 



PATRICK GEDDES 

MEMBER AND HON. LIBRARIAN OF THE TOWN PLANNING INSTITUTE 
DIRECTOR OF THE CITIES AND TOWN PLANNING EXHIBITION 



WITH 59 ILLUSTRATIONS 



LONDON 
WILLIAMS & NORGATE 

14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 
1915 



PREFACE 

FROM opening chapter to concluding summary it will 
be plain that this book is neither a technical treatise 
for the town-planner or city councillor, nor a manual 
of civics for the sociologist or teacher, but is of frankly 
introductory character. Yet it is not solely an 
attempt at the popularisation of the reviving art 
of town planning, of the renewing science of civics, 
to the general reader. What it seeks is to express 
in various ways the essential harmony of all these 
interests and aims ; and to emphasise the possibilities 
of readier touch and fuller co-operation among them. 
All this is no mere general ethical or economic appeal, 
but an attempt to show, with concrete arguments 
and local instances, that these too long separated 
aspects of our conduct of life and of affairs may be 
reunited in constructive citizenship. Despite our 
contemporary difficulties industrial, social, and 
political, there are available around us the elements 
of a civic uplift, and with this, of general advance to 
a higher plane of industrial civilisation. 

The civic awakening and the constructive effort 
are fully beginning, in healthy upgrowth, capable not 



vi CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

only of survival but of fuller cultivation also, towards 
varied flower and fruit flower in regional and civic 
literature and history, art, and science ; fruit in social 
renewal of towns and cities, small and great. Such 
renewal involves ever-increasing domestic and indi- 
vidual well-being, and these a productive efficiency, 
in which art may again vitalise and orchestrate the 
industries, as of old. 

Nor is this " merely Utopian," though frankly 
Eutopian. In matters civic, as in simpler fields of 
science, it is from facts surveyed and interpreted 
that we gain our general ideas of the direction of 
Evolution, and even see how to further this ; since 
from the best growths selected we may rear yet 
better ones. 

Furthermore, the book makes an appeal even to 
the professed town-planner, though he already knows 
the facts it contains. For its definite principle is that 
we must not too simply begin, as do too many, with 
fundamentals as of communications, and thereafter 
give these such aesthetic qualities of perspective and 
the rest, as may be, but above all things, seek to enter 
into the spirit of our city, its historic essence and 
continuous life. Our design will thus express, stimu- 
late, and develop its highest possibility, and so deal 
all the more effectively with its material and funda- 
mental needs. 

We cannot too fully survey and interpret the city 
for which we are to plan survey it at its highest 
in past, in present, and above all, since planning is 



PREFACE vii 

the problem, foresee its opening future. Its civic 
character, its collective soul, thus in some measure 
discerned and entered into, its active daily life may 
be more fully touched, and its economic efficiency 
more vitally stimulated. With civic energies and 
life thus renewing from within, and the bettered con- 
dition of the people kept clearly in view, the interior 
circulation and the larger communications from with- 
out will become all the clearer, and be surer than 
before of constructive efficiency and artistic effect. 
For civic considerations have to illuminate and 
control geographic ones, as well as conversely. 
Idealism and matter of fact are thus not sundered, 
but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by 
ideals of direction, themselves unreachably beyond 
the stars, yet indispensable to getting anywhere, save 
indeed downwards. 

Eutopia, then, lies in the city around us ; and it 
must be planned and realised, here or nowhere, by us 
as its citizens each a citizen of both the actual and 
the ideal city seen increasingly as one. 

Acknowledgments must be made to many friends, 
especially to those of the growing guild of town- 
planners, to whom this book might have been dedi- 
cated ; and if among these an individual name had to 
be selected, it should be Raymond Un win's. Again 
it should have been offered to other fellow-workers, in 
matters of civic betterment, in Edinburgh, in London, 
and in Dublin ; and since these have largely been 



viii CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

women, I should have wished to offer the book to that 
most effective and organising of civic workers, Lady 
Aberdeen. Or again to those few pioneering states- 
men who have most advanced the Town Planning 
Movement headed, of course, by the Rt. Hon. John 
Burns, but notably followed up by Lord Pentland 
when Secretary for Scotland, and now for Ireland by 
Lord Aberdeen, as in his generous intervention 
towards town planning and housing for Dublin. 

More detailed acknowledgments must not be 
forgotten, as notably to Messrs Bartholomew & Son 
for permission to reproduce the population-maps in 
Chapter II. from their Atlas of England', further to 
The Welsh Outlook for figs. 16 to 19, and to the 
Western Mail for the perspective of the Civic Centre 
at Cardiff. Several blocks and photographs have 
been communicated by Mr Ewart Culpin, Mr W. H. 
Godfrey, and Mr Raymond Unwin. The frontispiece 
and three other Edinburgh views are in the copyright 
of Mr Frank Inglis of Edinburgh, and the views of 
Dundee and Hampstead in that of Messrs Valentine 
& Sons, Ltd., Dundee. 

Last, but not least, I am indebted for not a few 
illustrations to my friend and colleague Mr F. C. 
Mears ; and for help with proofs, index, and illustra- 
tions to my wife and daughter. 

The reader will notice that the book has been in 
type before the war, but not a line or word has been 
altered, and only the closing sentence added ; since 



PREFACE ix 

the main theses of the book and its appreciations and 
criticisms of German cities are not affected by this 
turn of events. The Cities and Town Planning 
Exhibition, of which so much has been said in the 
following pages, has fully shared in the civic history 
it illustrated, by total destruction by the vigilant 
and enterprising Em den, but is none the less in 

process of renewal. 

PATRICK GEDDES. 



CONTENTS 

C IAP. PAGES 

1. THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES. . . . 1-24 

2. THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEAN- 

ING . . . ' . .. . - . . 25-45 

3. WORLD - CITIES AND THEIR OPENING 

COMPETITION .... . . 46-59 

t. PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC . . 60-83 

.. WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY . . 84-108 

(>. THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE . . . 109-143 

7. THE HOUSING MOVEMENT . . . . 144-1 60 

8. TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZEN- 

SHIP . 161-175 

9. A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY . 176-191 

10. GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 192-221 

11. HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING IN RE- 

CENT PROGRESS. . . . . . 222-245 

12 TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 246-294 

13 EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING, AND 

THE NEED OF CIVICS 295-312 

14. THE STUDY OF CITIES . . . . . 313-328 

15. THE SURVEY OF CITIES 329-338 



xii CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

16. CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PUR- 

POSES, OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOV- 
ERNMENT . 339-358 

17. THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 359-375 

18. ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT . . 376-392 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION . . . 393-402 
SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS .... 403-406 
INDEX 407-409 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Edinburgh, looking from Princes Street towards Castle and 
Old Town. Frontispiece 

F IG. PAGE 

1. Salisbury: Plan in eighteenth century .... 5 

2. Diagram of original lay-out .... 6 
,'J. Modern haphazard building .... 7 
k Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street house . 9 
f>. Court in Canongate . . . . .10 
(i. Grassmarket . . . . . .11 

7. St Nicolas, Belgium, showing large central space for 

markets, etc. . . . . . . . . 12 

8. Oxford: Plan of, 1578 14 

9. Edinburgh: Upper High Street 17 

10 and 11. Population-map of United Kingdom, with inset 

of coalfields . . . . . .23 

12. Greater London 27 

13, Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston " . . 31 
14 Midland towns agglomerating as " Midlandton " . . 36 

15. Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Fort h " 40 

16. Miners' cottages Cardiff: fronts . . 70 

17. backs . 71 

18. Woodlands, Yorkshire : fronts . . 72 

xiii 



xiv CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



PAGE 



19. Workers' cottages Earswick, Yorkshire: back gardens . 73 

20. Diagram, Town ^-Country : Country ^-Town 96 

21. Newcastle : Preservation of old mill in Jesmond Dene 

Park 98 

22. Primitive dwellings : suggestion for boys' corner of public 

park 100 

23. A children's garden in Old Edinburgh . . . .103 

24. Edinburgh : Confusion of small workshops behind working- 

class dwellings . . . . . . .104 

25. Edinburgh : West Princes Street Gardens . . .106 

26. Milne's Court 115 

27. Charlotte Square 121 

28. Back of Moray Place, with drying-greens and 

mews 123 

29. An improved tenement house (1892) in 

Upper High Street . . . .133 

30. Expansion of a Scottish industrial town . . . .135 

31. Edinburgh: Old tenements in Co wgate . . . .136 

32. New tenement village, Duddingston . .140 

33. Plan of Edinburgh, Old and New, before Railway Age . 146 

34. Edinburgh : Workers' cottages, Cox's gelatine works (1893) 153 

35. Port Sunlight : Cottages. . . . . . . 154 

36. Bournville : Girls' recreation ground . . . >. . 155 

37. New Earswick : Cottages . . . . . . 1 56 

38. Harborne Village : (a) Estate as planned under bye-laws ; 

(6) as executed by Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd. . 157 

39. Edinburgh railways : type of planless growth of Railway 

Age, as arresting town planning and impeding its 
recovery . . . . . . . . .159 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv 

F G. PACK 

40. Frankfort new docks, showing dockers' village, with 

garden, boulevards, park and lake . * . .197 

41. View in Hampstead Garden Suburb .... 224 

42. Parks and parkway girdle for a small American city : 

Roanoke . 233 

43. Plan of Cities and Town Planning Exhibition in Ghent, 

1913 . . / . . . . . .271 

41. Cardiff: Model of Civic Centre . . ... . 276 

45. Plan of a Netherlands town (Goch) seventeenth century . 282 

46. Plan of Mons : Showing beginning of fortifications . . 283 

47. Fully fortified, eighteenth century . . 284 

43. Plan of Netherlands town as example of scientific 

fortification of seventeenth century . . .285 

49. Outlook Tower, Edinburgh . . . . . .322 

50. showing different storeys 324 

51. Ramsay Garden, University Hall, Edinburgh . . . 327 

52. Birmingham in 1832, with its Parliamentary boundary . 351 
5.'}. Crosby Hall, Chelsea, as rebuilt in 1909-10 . . .374 
54. Garden Village, Roseburn, Edinburgh . . . .381 

5.5. Co-operative Tenants, Ltd.: Example of progressive 

development in planning : ^_. .... 383 

5(>. Harton Estate, South Shields : Example of changes from 
conventional plan and lay-out of former years ; type 
easily adaptable to bye-law streets anywhere . . 385 

57. New Leven : Design for garden suburb of a small 

Fifeshire town . . . . . . . 390 

58. Design for seal of Civics Institute of Ireland . . .391 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

CHAPTER I 

THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 

The (volution of cities is here treated, not as an exposition of origins, 
but as a study in contemporary social evolution, an inquiry into 
tendencies in progress. Difficulties of approach to civic studies, 
and civic betterment. Examples to arouse interest e.g. of antiquary 
and artist, of builder, of housewife and artisan, etc. Needed cor- 
rection of popular ideas, e.g. of medieval towns. The traveller and 
his need of "synoptic vision." Aristotle to Adam Smith. Defects 
of current education in delaying needed progress from abstract 
politics to concrete civics. Criticisms of the former : need of 
concrete knowledge, e.g. of Dublin and Belfast, etc. The political 
and the civic attitude in London affairs, as concentrating upon 
election returns and upon town plan respectively. 

ALIKE in Europe and in America the problems 
of the city have come to the front, and are in- 
creasingly calling for interpretation and for treat- 
ment. Politicians of all parties have to confess 
their traditional party methods inadequate to cope 
with them. Their teachers hitherto the national 
and general historians, the economists of this school 
or that have long been working on very different 
lines ; and though new students of civics are appear- 
ing in many cities, no distinct consensus has yet 
been reached among them, even as to methods of 



2 'CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

inquiry, still less as to results. Yet that in our 
cities here, there, perhaps everywhere a new 
stirring of action, a new arousal of thought, have 
begun, none will deny ; nor that these are alike 
fraught with new policies and ambitions, fresh out- 
looks and influences ; with which the politician and 
the thinker have anew to reckon. A new social 
science is forming, a new social art developing that 
much is surely becoming plain to every observer of 
contemporary social evolution ; and what press and 
parliaments are beginning to see to-day, even the 
most backward of town councils, the most submissive 
of their voters, the most indifferent of their tax- 
payers, will be sharply awakened to to-morrow. 
Berlin and Boston, London and New York, Man- 
chester and Chicago, Dublin, smaller cities as well- 
all till lately, and still no doubt mainly, concentrated 
upon empire or national politics, upon finance, 
commerce, or manufactures is not each awakening 
towards a new and more intimate self-conscious- 
ness ? This civic self is still too inarticulate: we 
cannot give it clear expression: it is as yet mostly 
in the stage of a strife of feelings, in which pain 
and pleasure, pride and shame, misgivings and 
hopes are variously mingling, and from which 
definite ideas and ideals are only beginning here 
and there to emerge. Of this general fermentation 
of thought the present volume is a product one no 
doubt only too fully retaining its incompleteness. 
The materials towards this nascent science are thus 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 3 

not merely being collected by librarians, published 
in all forms from learned monographs to passionate 
appealings, and from statistical tables to popular 
picture-books: they are germinating in our minds, 
and this even as we walk the streets, as we read our 
newspapers. 

Shall we make our approach, then, to the study of 
cities, the inquiry into their evolution, beginning 
with them, as American city students commonly 
prefer to do, upon their modern lines, taking them 
as we find them? Or shall we follow the historic 
and developmental method, to which so many 
European cities naturally invite us ? Or if some- 
thing of both, in what proportion, what order ? And, 
beyond past and present, must we not seek into our 
cities' future ? 

The study of human evolution is not merely a 
retrospect of origins in the past. That is but a 
palaeontology of man his Archaeology and History. 
It is not even the analysis of actual social processes 
in the present that physiology of social man is, 
or should be, Economics. Beyond the first question 
of Whence ? Whence have things come ? and the 
second, of How? How do they live and work? 
the evolutionist must ask a third. Not, as of old 
at best, What next? as if anything might come; 
but rather Whither? Whither away? For it is 
surely of the essence of the evolution concept hard 
though it be to realise it, more difficult still to apply 
it that it should not only inquire how this of to-day 



4 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

may have come out of that of yesterday, but be 
foreseeing and preparing for what the morrow is even 
now in its turn bringing towards birth. This of 
course is difficult so difficult as ever to be throwing 
us back to inquire into present conditions, and beyond 
these into earlier ones; yet with the result that in 
these inquiries, necessary as they are, fascinating as 
they become, a whole generation of specialists, since 
the doctrine of evolution came clearly into view, have 
lost sight or courage to return to its main problem 
that of the discernment of present tendency, amid 
the apparent phantasmagoria of change. 

In short, then, to decipher the origins of cities in 
the past, and to unravel their life-processes in the 
present, are not only legitimate and attractive in- 
quiries, but indispensable ones for every student of 
civics whether he would visit and interpret world- 
cities, or sit quietly by his window at home. But as 
the agriculturist, besides his interest in the past 
pedigrees and present condition of his stock and crops, 
must not, on pain of ruin, lose sight of his active 
preparation for next season, but value these studies 
as he can apply them towards this, so it is with the 
citizen. For him surely, of all men, evolution is most 
plainly, swiftly in progress, most manifest, yet most 
mysterious. Not a building of his city but is sound- 
ing as with innumerable looms, each with its manifold 
warp of circumstance, its changeful weft of life. The 
patterns here seem simple, there intricate, often mazy 
beyond our unravelling, and all well-nigh are chang- 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 5 

ing, even day by day, as we watch. Nay, these very 
webs are themselves anew caught up to serve as 
threads again, within new and vaster combinations. 
Yet within this labyrinthine civicomplex there are no 
mere spectators. Blind or seeing, inventive or un- 
thinking, joyous or unwilling each has still to weave 




FIG. i. Salisbury : Plan in eighteenth century showing survival of 
original (thirteenth-century) planning. 

in, ill or well, and for worse if not for better, the 
whole thread of his life. 

Our task is rendered difficult by the immensity of 
its materials. What is to be said of cities in general, 
where your guide-book to Rome, or Paris, or London, 
is a crowded and small-typed volume? when book- 
sellers' windows are bright with beautifully illustrated 
volumes, each for a single city? and when each of 
these is but an introduction to a mass of literature 
for every city, vast beyond anticipation? Thus, 



6 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

taking for example one of the smallest of historic 
cities one now known to few in Britain, fewer still 
in America, save in association with the world-famous 
generosities of one of its children, steeped early in its 
traditions of patriotism and of literature Mr Erskine 
Beveridge's valuable Bibliography of Dunfermline 
fills a bulky crown octavo of closely printed two- 
columned pages ! 




FlG. 2. Diagram of original lay-out of city blocks. 

Again, each specialist, each general reader also, is 
apt to have his interest limited to the field of his own 
experience. If we are to interest the antiquary or 
the tourist, it must be first of all from their own 
point of view ; but we reach this if we can show them, 
for instance, exactly how r one of their favourite 
cathedral cities notably Salisbury, for choice was 
planned. At the exodus of its Bishop from Old 
Sarum in 1220, he brought its citizens after him into 
what he had laid out as a veritable garden city ; so 
that Salisbury at its beginnings six centuries ago was 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 7 

curiously like Letchworth or Hampstead Suburb 
to-day, so far as its homes were concerned. Indeed, 
their architects will be the first to recognise that 
Salisbury had advantages of greater garden space, of 
streams carried through the streets ; not to speak of 
the great cathedral arising in its spacious close beyond. 
Thus interested, the antiquary is now the very man 
to lead us in tracing out how the present crowded 




FIG. 3. Illustration of modern haphazard building over gardens. 

courts and gardenless slums of Salisbury have un- 
mistakably (and comparatively lately) arisen from 
the deterioration of one old garden-home after another. 
He rediscovers for himself in detail how curiously 
and closely medieval town planning and housing, 
thus recovered, anticipates that of our Garden Cities ; 
and whether he care to renew such things or not, he 
can next help us with more difficult cases, even with 
what is probably the most difficult of all Old Edin- 
burgh, so long the most overcrowded and deteriorated 
of all the world's cities yet with its past never 



8 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

wholly submerged, and thus one of the most richly 
instructive, most suggestive to the fresh-eyed observer, 
to the historic student. Hence here the impulse of 
Scott's reopening of the world-romance of history, 
and next of Carlyle's tragi-comic rendering of its 
significance ; here is the canvas of Robert Louis 
Stevenson's subtly embroidered page ; and now in 
turn, in more scientific days, the natural centre 
for the earliest of British endeavours towards the 
initiation of a school of sociology with its theories 
and a school of civics with its surveys and in- 
terpretations. 

The painter may be at first harder to deal with, for 
he has as yet too seldom begun to dream how many 
new subjects for his art the future is here preparing, 
when our Garden-Suburb avenues have grown and 
their cottage roofs have mellowed. Yet we shall 
reach him too even next spring, for then our young 
orchard will have its first blossoms, and the children 
will be at play in it. The builder, again, eager to 
proceed with more cottages, is impatient of our civic 
dreams, and will not look at our old-world plans of 
temples or cathedrals. As yet he is somewhat apt to 
miss, in church, and still more in the business week, 
what a certain old-world aphorism concerning the 
frequency of failures among those who build without 
an ideal may mean if restated in modern terms. 
Again, the utilitarian housewife, busy in her compact 
and convenient, but generally rather small and sun- 
less scullery, may well be incredulous when we tell 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 9 

her that in what have now become the slums of Old 
Edinburgh, for instance, this scullery was situated in 
the porch, or on a covered but open first-floor balcony, 
until she can be shown the historic evidence, and 




FIG. 4. Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street houses, with 
open-air galleries. 

even the survivals of this. Even then, so strong is 
habit, she will probably prefer her familiar arrange- 
ment ; at any rate until she realises how, for lack of 
this medieval and returning open-air treatment, she 
or her little maid may be on the verge of consumption. 



10 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Her husband, the skilled artisan in steady employ- 
ment, with bigger wages and shorter hours than his 
Continental rival, may well stare to be told how much 
more there is that makes life best worth living in 
many a German working-town as compared with 
ours ; or how, were he a mechanic in Marseilles or 
Nimes, or many another French city, he would be 




FIG. 5. Surviving court in Canongate, with outside stairs, etc. 

week-ending all summer with his family at their little 
country property now looking after his vineyard, or 
resting under his own fig-tree. "Gibove all, let us end 
this preliminary unsettling of popular beliefs as we 
began. Rich man and poor, Conservative and Liberal, 
Radical and Socialist have all alike to be upset in 
most of what they have been all their lives accustomed 
to hear and to repeat of the poverty and the misery and 
the degradation of the towns of the Middle Ages, 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 



11 




12 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and from which they have been so often told we have 
in every way progressed so far by having put before 
them a few of their old plans and pictures, say from 
the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. For there 
or indeed in any public library it is easy to search 




FIG. 7. St Nicolas, old town of Pays de Waes in (Belgian) Netherlands : 
Large central space for markets, archery butts, maypole, etc. 

out the old documents, as in well-nigh every town the 
actual survivals, which prove how grand and spacious 
were the market and public places, how ample the 
gardens, even how broad and magnificent might be 
the thoroughfares, of many a medieval town. What 
is to blame in them and nowadays rightly enough- 
has mainly been introduced in the centuries since the 
Middle Ages died the very worst of it within the 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 13 

industrial period, and much within our own times. 
If a concrete instance of this be wanted, the world 
has none to offer more dramatic and complete than 
that of the Historic Mile of Old Edinburgh, and 
especially its old High Street, in which this is being 
written. For, as we have above indicated, this mass 
of medieval and renaissance survivals has been, and 
too nearly is still, the most squalid conglomeration, ' 
the most over-crowded area in the old world : even 
in the new, at most the emigrant quarter of New 
York or Chicago has rivalled its evil pre-eminence. 
Yet our " Civic Survey of Edinburgh " shows these 
evils as mainly modern, and that the town planning 
of the thirteenth century was conceived not only 
relatively, but positively on lines in their way ' 
more spacious than those which have made our 
" New Town " and its modern boulevard of Princes 
Street famous. 

Aristotle the founder of civic studies, as of so 
many others wisely insisted upon the importance, 
not only of comparing city constitutions (as he did, 
a hundred and sixty-three of them), but of seeing 
our city with our own eyes. He urged that our 
view be truly synoptic, a word which had not then 
become abstract, but was vividly concrete, as its 
make-up shows : a seeing of the city, and this as 
a whole ; like Athens from its Acropolis, like city 
and Acropolis together the real Athens from 
Lycabettos and from Piraeus, from hill- top and from 
sea. Large views in the abstract, Aristotle knew 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 




THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 15 

and thus compressedly said, depend upon large views 
in the concrete. Forgetting thus to base them is 
the weakness which has so constantly ruined the 
philosopher, and has left him, despite his marvellous 
abstract powers, in one age a sophist in spite of 
Aristotle, in another a schoolman in spite of Albertus 
Magnus, or again a pedant in spite of Bacon. So 
also in later times ; and with deadly results to civics, 
and thence to cities. Hence the constitution-makers 
of the French Revolution ; or of most modern politics, 
still so abstract in spite of Diderot's Encyclopaedia, 
of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, each abounding 
in wide observation. Hence, too, the long lapse of 
political economy into a dismal science ; although 
it arose concretely enough, first by generalising the 
substantial agricultural experience of De Quesnay in 
France, and then qualifying this by the synoptic 
urban impressions of Adam Smith. For, as the 
field -excursions of our Edinburgh School of Sociology 
are wont to verify, his main life and apparently his 
abstract work were primarily but the amplification 
and sound digestion of his own observations not 
only in maturity at Glasgow, but in boyhood and 
youth in his earlier homes. Nowhere more clearly 
can one realise that superiority to agriculture as a 
means of wealth, of the manufactures, the shipping 
and the foreign trade, on which Smith insisted so 
strongly, than in a ramble through the old-world 
merchant towns Kirkcaldy, Dysart, and the rest 
which line the coast of Fife. For in Smith's day, 



16 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

though not in ours, Fife was a "beggar's mantle 
with a fringe of gold," as King James the Sixth and 
First so shrewdly and picturesquely described it five 
or six generations earlier ; and with exactly the same 
economic insight. 

So bookish has been our past education, so strict 
our school drill of the " three R's," and so well-nigh 
complete our lifelong continuance among them, that 
nine people out of ten, sometimes even more, under- 
stand print better than pictures, and pictures better 
than reality. Thus, even for the few surviving 
beautiful cities of the British Isles, their few mar- 
vellous streets for choice the High Street of Oxford 
and the High Street of Edinburgh a few well- 
chosen picture postcards will produce more effect 
upon most people's minds than does the actual vision 
of their monumental beauty there colleges and 
churches, here palace, castle, and city's crown. Since 
for the beauty of such streets, and to their best 
elements of life and heritage, we have become half- 
blind, so also for their deteriorated ones; especially 
when, as in such old culture-cities, these may largely 
be the fossilisation of learning or of religion, and not 
merely the phenomena of active decay. Yet even 
these we realise more readily from the newspaper's 
brief chronicle, than from the weltering misery too 
often before our eyes. 

Happily the more regional outlook of science is 
beginning to counteract this artificial blindness. The 
field-naturalist has of course always been working in 



1 





& 

bfl 

5 



CU 
0, 



18 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

this direction. So also the photographer, the painter, 
the architect ; their public also are following, and 
may soon lead. Even open-air games have been for 
the most part too confined and subjective : it is 
but yesterday that the campers -out went afield; 
to-day the boy scouts are abroad; to-morrow our 
young airmen will be recovering the synoptic vision. 
Thus education, at all its levels, begins to tear away 
those blinkers of many print-layers which so long 
have been strapped over our eyes. 

Whether one goes back to the greatest or to the 
simplest towns, there is little to be learnt of civics by 
asking their inhabitants. Often they scarcely know 
who are their own town councillors, or, if they do, 
they commonly sneer at them ; albeit these are 
generally better citizens than those who elect them. 
They have forgotten most of the history of their own 
city ; and the very schools, till at any rate the other 
day, were the last places where you could learn any- 
thing about it. They even wish to forget it: it 
seems to them often something small and petty to 
be interested in its affairs. The shallow politician's 
sneer has done deadly work from Shetland to Corn- 
wall ; what should have been their best townsfolk 
have too long felt above meddling with mere local 
"gas and sewage." Even the few thinking young 
men and women in each social caste with exceptions 
of course, now more and more counting are not yet 
citizens, either in thought or deed. If not absorbed 
by party politics, they more commonly think of be- 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 19 

coining administrators, and state officialism is far 
more attractive than the city's ; the " civil service " 
is familiar to all, but civic service a seldom-heard 
phrase, a still rarer ambition. Do they dabble as 
polhical economists ? High abstracts and sublimates 
of all these common types of mind are found in all 
groups and parties, and are to be diagnosed not by 
their widely differing party opinions, but by their 
common blankness to civics. One is all for Tariff 
Reform, his fellow argues no less convincingly for 
Free Trade ; one stands for Home Rule, and another 
for Central Government ; one is all for peace, another 
hot for war, and so on. Yet "practical politicians" 
as they all alike claim to be, to us students of cities 
they seem alike unpractical, unreal ; since un- 
observant, that is ignorant, of this concrete geo- 
graphical world around them, uninterested in it. 
Suppose you venture into the subject of Germany, 
for instance, and attempt any conversation about 
particular German cities and their respective activities 
and interests ; you inquire where the interest, say, of 
Berlin may differ from that of London ; where that, 
say, of Hamburg may partly differ, partly coincide, 
or where that other may be comparatively indifferent ? 
You soon find how much these cities are all one to 
them ; and you risk seeming " unpatriotic," and this 
to both alike, if you would have them know more. 
Such a Tariff Reformer, and his complemental Free 
Trader, are in agreement in having no suggestions, 
and even no use, for a Survey of Liverpool and beside 



20 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

it another of Manchester, though these of all cities 
should surely help us towards a fuller understanding 
of such questions. Their neighbours at the next 
beer-counter or tea-table, hotly discussing Unionism 
and Home Rule, and thus necessarily bandying 
" Belfast " and " Dublin," are commonly no less poor 
in those concrete images of either city, which our 
civic studies are accumulating ; and hence in any 
verifiable general ideas about them also. " Boston," 
it is said, "is not a place; it is a state of mind." 
Does not the same apply to the " Belfast " and the 
" Dublin " we hear so much of, whether in Parliament 
or in Press? After spending a single summer (of 
course a time most insufficient, but more than most 
of even the leaders of controversy would care to give) 
upon the study of these two great cities, one becomes 
deeply impressed by this distrust. Neither city is so 
simple as it is made out. 

To get down to the essential facts and processes 
of the life of cities, let us take a city where there is 
no burning political question prominent just now. 
Say, then, Edinburgh, of which our survey, many 
years in progress, is least incomplete. 

Edinburgh ? Edinburgh ! A Scottish member 
would be the first to blush for such provincialism. 
Is he still a student? Admittedly not. We have 
roused the politician, and he reproves us in vigorous 
strain. He is not going back to the Heptarchy, that 
he should be asked to map out its petty provinces, 
much less survey their constituent boroughs : he is 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 21 

not going to concern himself with the parish pump ! 
Well, though the very importance of London makes 
it easier to begin with smaller and more intelligible 
places, let us return thither and do our best. 

Some years ago three or four members of the 
Sociological Society, including the writer, were 
honoured by an invitation to take part in a sym- 
posium, which agreed to dine at one of the great 
political clubs and then to discuss " The Possible 
Future of London Government." We listened 
meekly and long, gradually learning what this title 
meant : not, as we innocently had expected, and even 
imagined we had been promised, a foresight of better 
organisation for the great city, a discussion of what 
improvements and expansions this better organisation 
might realise, and even some vision of Utopia beyond. 
Not at all. It amounted to nothing, in brief, save 
the transposition of Ins and Outs, the substitution/^ 
of Outs for Ins. Only when in the fulness of time 
this subject was temporarily exhausted, was it re- 
membered that a sociological deputation was in 
attendance. We were then asked to speak : and 
now, to do the chairman justice, quite to the point, 
as we had understood it. So our first spokesman 
began "May I have a plan of London?" "Certainly," 
said the chairman ; but there was none forthcoming. 
" Then an atlas will do " (remembering that the club 
possesses a not inconsiderable library). " Certainly ; 
what atlas?" "Conveniently the Royal Geographical 
Society's Atlas of England and Wales." The waiter 



22 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

again returns with the librarian's regrets that they 
have not got it. " Well, any atlas at all 1 There 
will surely be some map of London, on which we 
can make out its constituent and adjacent boroughs?" 
Final return of waiter " Librarian very sorry, sir ; 
he has no atlas in the library." Our spokesman's 
opening under these circumstances was brief. " That, 
gentlemen, expresses clearly the difference between 
your political idea of London and our sociological 
one. We have understood you perfectly ; your point 
of view was very interesting to us ; but only when 
you have got an atlas, and used it, will you understand 
ours." However, he drew a rough plan ; and we ex- 
plained our views as best we could but with scanty 
discussion and soon farewells, not followed by 
reinvitation. 

Hence we have to appeal to the reader, their 
accepted judge, as here ours. Has he an atlas on 
which cities can be made out ? At any rate he has 
access to one the Royal Geographical Society's 
Atlas of England and Wales aforesaid (Bartholomew, 
Edinburgh, 1902) in the nearest public library. If 
it be not there, let the librarian have no peace till he 
gets it. For he will find that it contains the one and 
only really good map he has ever seen indeed the 
only adequate one yet in existence of the distribu- 
tion of the population of England ; London and its 
boroughs, and all the towns of England as well ; but 
no longer as the mere dots scattered over the map, 
which we learned long ago at school before we were 



THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 



23 




FIGS. 10 and 11. Population-map of United Kingdom, with inset of Coalfields of same. 



24 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

interested in them, and so have largely forgotten, 
like so much of the same kind. By courtesy of its 
publishers we here supply a reproduction of it ; but 
as this is necessarily greatly reduced, and moreover 
without colouring, reference should also be made 
to the large and vivid original. We shall see some 
of its uses in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER II 

THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 

The Population-Map and its uses. London ("Greater London") as a 
spreading man-reef. Even its modern form of government, afforded 
by the L.C.C., is constantly being outgrown. Need of inquiry into 
smaller cities and city-groups. But here the same growth-process 
appears, industrial towns and cities uniting into vast city-regions, 
" conurbations," which the broadest surveys are needed to realise. 
Conception of urban Lancashire as the vastest of conurbations, 
exceeding Greater London itself, and yet now demanding com- 
prehensive foresight and civic statesmanship as a whole. Beside 
this vast "Lancaston" are arising other colossal city-groups, here 
generalised as "West Riding," "South Riding," " Midlandton," 
' k Southwaleston," and " Tyne-Wear-Tees." Thus is arising a 
veritable New Heptarchy, whose water supplies and coalfields, and 
kindred local affairs, are thus the essentials of national existence, no 
longer negligible as the mere "parish pump" and "coal-cellar" of 
metropolitan politics. Similar conception of Greater Glasgow and 
Edinburgh, as " Clyde- Forth." New forms of civic and rural 
organisation thus becoming needed, yet before these, fuller 
surveys, deeper diagnoses ; and further again, preliminary con- 
ferences representations of all concerned, of all aspects therefore, 
as well as interests. 

GIVEN, then, our population-map, what has it to show 
us ? Starting from the most generally known before 
proceeding towards the less familiar, observe first the 
mapping of London here plainly shown, as it is 
properly known, as Greater London with its vast 
population streaming out in all directions east, west, 
north and south flooding all the levels, flowing up 

25 



26 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the main Thames valley and all the minor ones, 
filling them up, crowded and dark, and leaving only 
the intervening patches of high ground pale. Here, 
then, and in the coloured original of course more 
clearly, we have the first, and (up to the time of its 
making) the only, fairly accurate picture of the 
growing of Greater London. This octopus of 
London, polypus rather, is something curious ex- 
ceedingly, a vast irregular growth without previous 
parallel in the world of life perhaps likest to the 
spreadings of a great coral reef. Like this, it has a 
stony skeleton, and living polypes call it, then, a 
"man-reef" if you will. Onward it grows, thinly at 
first, the pale tints spreading further and faster than 
the others, but the deeper tints of thicker population 
at every point steadily following on. Within lies a 
dark and crowded area; of which, however, the 
daily pulsating centre calls on us to seek some fresh 
comparison to higher than coralline life. Here, at 
any rate, all will agree, is an approximation to the 
real aspect of Greater London as distinguished from 
Historic London. What matter to us, who look at 
it for the moment in this detached way from very 
far above, or even really to the actual citizens them- 
selves to-day, those old boundaries of the counties, 
which were once traced so painfully and are still so 
strictly maintained, from use and wont or for purposes 
other than practical ones ? What really matter 
nowadays the divisions between innumerable con- 
stituent villages and minor boroughs whose historic 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 27 

names are here swallowed up, apparently for ever, 
like those microscopic plants, those tiny plants and 
animals, which a big spreading amosba so easily 
includes, so resistlessly devours? Here for most 
practical purposes is obviously a vast new unity, long 
ago well described as "a province covered with 




FIG. 12. Greater London. 

houses." Indeed a house-province, spreading over, 
absorbing, a great part of south-east England. Even 
the outlying patches of dense population already 
essentially belong to it ; some for practical purposes 
entirely, like Brighton. Instead of the ^dJines_Qf 
divsion we have new lines of union : the very word 
"lines" nowadays most readily suggesting the rail- 
ways, which are the throbbing arteries, the roaring 
pulses of the intensely living whole ; or, again, sug- 
gesting 4 the telegraph wires running beside them, so 



28 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

many nerves, each carrying impulses of idea and 
action either way. It is interesting, it is necessary 
even, to make an historic survey of London an 
embryology, as it were of this colossal whole. We 
should, of course, look first into its two historic cities ; 
we should count in its many boroughs as they grew 
up before being absorbed ; we should take note of, 
however easily we forget, its innumerable absorbed 
old villages and hamlets, its ever new and ever 
spreading dormitory areas loosely built and distant 
for the rich, nearer and more crowded for the middle 
class, and where shall we seek or put the worker or 
the poor? We see, we recognise these many 
corporate or at least associated units of the body 
politic, all growing more and more fully into one vast 
agglomerate, and this with its own larger corporate 
government, its County Council, Yet even this is 
already far outgrown ; but in time, if the growth- 
process continues, as in every way obviously under 
present conditions it must, this governing body must 
overtake the spreading growth, and bring all that is 
really functional London into its province, with 
economy and advantage to the vast majority of all 
concerned. Of course, in a general way, all this is 
already known to the reader to Londoners, greater 
or smaller ; but does it not gain a new vividness with 
such a map before us, a new suggestiveness also ? 
Do we not see, and more and more clearly as we 
study it, the need of a thorough revision of our 
traditional ideas and boundaries of country and 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 29 

town ? As historians and topographers we cannot 
too faithfully conserve the record of all these absorbed 
elements ; but as practical men governing, or being 
governed, we have practically done with them. Let 
the Lord Mayor of London and his Corporation 
survive by all means, as historic monuments and for 
auld lang syne ; let there be for the historic City, and 
for the neighbouring boroughs not merely West- 
minster, but every regional unit that can practically 
justify it, and so far as may be local autonomy too. 
We are making no plea for over-centralisation ; on 
the contrary, we are inclined to think that many 
ganglia may be needed to maintain the health of so 
vast and multi-radiate a body politic. But the 
essential thing is that common arrangements for life 
and health and efficiency be made in the main 
according to the present and the opening develop- 
ments, and not maintained unduly upon the lines of 
history ; otherwise we shall continue to have local 
friction, overlapping and wastage, arrests and en- 
cystments, congestions, paralysis even, instead of the 
general and local health and economy we surely all 
of us desire. 

Look now at the map of London with any friend, or, 
if possible, with two a Progressive and a Moderate. 
What real difference survives between them when 
they sit down like plain, open-minded citizens to look 
at the map the original, if possible, we again repeat. 
Do they not agree that both their parties would 
do well to sit down to it also, to survey the whole 



30 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

situation afresh ? If so, our plea for City Survey is 
growing intelligible ; and even its economy, its 
positive fruitfulness, would before long begin to 
appear. As, however, our Progressive and Moderate 
friends continue these studies, and as the vastness of 
the problems of London thus increases upon them, 
they will admit that they are, separately or collect- 
ively, unable clearly to realise all that is going on in 
this vast man-reef, and still more to foresee what the 
morrow will bring forth. Still, one has this definite 
bit of knowledge and the other that now of the part 
of London where he was brought up or lived as a 
young man or of the places where he works and lives 
now. So gradually we piece together in conversation 
a good deal of useful knowledge, it may be even of 
practical suggestion, here and there. But as our two 
type- Londoners' studies go on, as with growing 
interest they would, they would soon come to new 
points of difficulty, to problems too vast readily to be 
grappled with ; and one would ask another, " Cannot 
we learn something as to this from what they are 
doing in smaller places, in simpler cities than this 
tremendous London of ours ? There is Birmingham, 
it might help us." The other might agree ; and even 
remember that he had heard from an American friend 
of an active municipality in Glasgow. Suppose they 
look them up in the atlas. Alas ! these also have 
spread beyond the simple dots we learned to identify 
as school-boys ; and instead we see great and growing 
masses, each essentially like another London. Let us 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 31 

try Lancashire, with its great cities ; that will surely 
help us. There is Manchester, with its great Liberal 
and Free Trade record ; there is Liverpool, with its 
equally strong Conservatism ; they surely must have 
threshed matters out between them. But behold, 
upon our map these, too, are fast becoming little more 
than historic expressions. The fact is that we have 




FIG. 13. Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston." 

here another vast province almost covered with house- 
groups, swiftly spreading into one, and already con- 
nected up at many points, and sometimes by more 
than sufficient density of population along the main 
lines of communication. Here, far more than even 
Lancashire commonly realises, is growing up again 
another Greater London as it were a city-region of 
which Liverpool is the seaport and Manchester the 
market, now with its canal port also ; while Oldham, 
and the many other factory towns, more accurately 
called " factory districts," are the workshops. Even 



32 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

if this process be not in all respects so far advanced 
as in London, and as yet not organised in practice 
under any common government, is it not becoming 
fairly plain, a matter of reasonable foresight, that if 
growth and progress are to continue much longer as 
they have long been doing in some respects of late 
faster than ever the separate and detached towns, 
whose names we learned at school and still for local 
purposes employ, will become mainly of minor and 
district usefulness, postal and what not, like the 
practically unified cities and boroughs of London ? 
Hence, if we are to avoid the many mistakes and 
misfortunes of London through the past delay and 
present confusions of its organisation and government, 
is it not time to be thinking of, and even to be start- 
ing, a unified survey of Urban Lancashire ? This, as 
in the case of Greater London, we should consider at 
every point with the utmost respect to local history 
and even to administrative autonomy, yet also as part 
of a greater whole, already only too much consol- 
idated at many points, and still growing together. 
Is it asked, " Of what use is all this ? " Of many uses, 
but enough here if we cite two Public Health and 
Town Planning. Only a word, then, of each ; and 
first Public Health. 

These great communities are already exercised 
yet in most cases not nearly exercised enough about 
their sanitation and their water supply ; and here our 
peripatetic Health Congresses and their papers have 
some arousing influence, though not yet sufficient. 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 33 

Moreover, if better crops of human population (as we 
are nil becoming determined) are to be grown than 
the present one, the question of a fuller and a far 
more vital access of youth to the country and to 
country life and occupations must assume an in- 
comparably greater importance, and correspondingly 
greater space than that which has yet been given it 
by municipalities even with the most exemplary of 
Parks Departments, bright patches though these 
show amid our vast labyrinths of streets. 

Even in the town-planning movement this en- 
larged way of looking at our enlarging cities is not 
nearly common enough. The architect is accustomed 
to single buildings, or to street plans at most ; the 
city engineer is accustomed to streets, or to street- 
quarters at most ; and both are reluctant to enlarge 
their vision. They still speak as if any such wide 
outlook and foresight were " ahead of the times " 
" might be useful fifty years hence " and so on 
through a dozen variants of the grumbling protests 
which are a main symptom of the senile phase, 
which fixity to environment may bring on at all 
ages. But now, returning to Public Health, in each 
and every one of the Congresses of Health and 
Sanitation which now meet so anxiously from year 
to year in one after another of these great cities, is 
it not obvious to every member of these, as regards 
the large cities around them, that they are late 
enough even if they begin forthwith ? Their accesses 
to Nature and natural conditions have already been 



34 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

three-fourths destroyed ; indeed more, so far as the 
working mother and her children are concerned 
that is, the nation of to-morrow. The neighbouring 
great towns are rapidly linking up by tramways and 
streets no less than railways ; while great open spaces, 
which might have been not so long ago cheaply 
secured as unrivalled lungs of life, are already all but 
irrecoverable. 

Here are already solid arguments for our proposed 
survey, and they might be strengthened and amplified, 
were not our problem here and in this volume mainly 
the clearing of ideas before the shaping of policy. 

To focus these developments, indeed transforma- 
tions, of the geographic tradition of town and 
country in which we were brought up, and express 
them more sharply, we need some little extension of 
our vocabulary ; for each new idea for which we 
have not yet a word deserves one. Some name, then, 
for these city -regions, these town aggregates, is 
wanted. Constellations we cannot call them ; con- 
glomerations is, alas ! nearer the mark at present, but 
it may sound unappreciative ; what of " Conurba- 
tions ? " That perhaps may serve as the necessary 
word, as an expression of this new form of popula- 
tion-grouping, which is already, as it were sub- 
consciously, developing new forms of social grouping 
and of definite government and administration by 
and by also. 

For our first conurbation the name of Greater 
London is obviously already dominant beyond possi- 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 35 

bility of competition ; but we need some name for 
the Lancashire region also, and for each similar one 
we may discover. Failing a better name, since we 
cannot sink Liverpool and other cities in a " Greater 
Manchester " or the like, let us christen the vast con- 
urbation of the Lancashire millions as "Lancaston." 
It is this ''Survey of Lancaston" which its con- 
stituent cities and boroughs most need to realise ; 
and this both in detail and in mass. Imagine it 
photographed from an aeroplane journey, as well as 
mapped street by street, like Mr Booth's London 
Survey, indeed, in some ways, more fully still. 
Towards the former of these requirements we have 
little or nothing since Bartholomew's map, already so 
often referred to ; and in all these ways we can 
gradually accustom ourselves to visualise the region. 
What are its existing defects ? and what its remain- 
ing possibilities ? What natural reserves still remain 
to separate its growing villages and suburbs ? What 
gardens and allotments are still possible to sanify 
them ? 

Leaving Lancaston, we have but to cross the 
Pem lines to see along the foot of their eastward slope 
another dark galaxy of towns. Huddersfield, Brad- 
ford, and their neighbours constitute the world- 
metropolis of wool no less distinctly than does 
Lancaston that of cotton. What shall we call this 
province, this natural city-alliance ? Why not, in an 
urban sense, as of old a rustic one, simply preserve 
the good name of West Riding? Similarly for 



36 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



South Riding, as we may call the conurbation cen- 
tring round the steel and coal of Sheffield. Note, 
again, the present expansion of Birmingham, which has 
of late legitimately succeeded in having its overflowing 
suburbs unified with itself, its extraordinary growth 
recognised, as now a city rivalling even Manchester 




FIG. 14. Midland towns agglomerating as " Midlandton." 

or Glasgow. Invigorated by absorbing its outlying 
suburbs, Birmingham is already planning new exten- 
sions upon that bold and generous scale of civic design 
not so long ago characteristic of great cities ; but 
lapsed, eclipsed, forgotten with the coming on of the 
Railway Age. Yet this present expansion is but a 
step in the old process. A yet fuller recognition of 
regional facts is what we are here pleading ; for the 
recent Birmingham Extension Act has little if any 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 37 

adequately natural regional basis, but is only a 
temporary and makeshift expansion after all, especi- 
ally if prosperity and growth are to continue, as seems 
reasonably probable. This larger recognition of 
regional facts involves the conception of a larger 
city- region " Midlandton," as we may perhaps call 
it : and Greater and growing Birmingham is but the 
capical of this, though its exact limits may be hard 
to define. The recent union of the " Five Towns " 
is thus not only a local event, but a regional pioneer- 
ing, a noteworthy example of an incipient urban re- 
grouping. And here let us hope that the Duke of 
Sutherland's generous gift of Trentham may similarly 
augur a period of better and closer relations of town 
and country throughout the land than have been 
those of yesterday. 

Pass next to South Wales, where on its magnificent 
coalfield the same process of development is at work. 
And, speaking of coalfields, we may conveniently 
here call attention to the close coincidence of this 
great centre of population with its magnificent South 
Wales coalfield, in the small inset map of the national 
coal -cellars in the top right-hand corner, and thence 
note the parallelism of each great conurbation to its 
coalfield, save in the case of London alone. We 
plainly see the development of a Greater Cardiff, a 
veritable (South) Waleston, whose exact limits and 
relation to the metallurgic centre of Swansea are, 
of course, for its regional geographer to define. Pass 
next northwards to the Tyne towns, with which we 



38 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

must plainly also take those of Wear and Tees, as 
constituting a new regional community, a natural 
province Tyne- Wear-Tees, we may perhaps call it. 
It is interesting in this connection to recall that our 
British Gallery at the Brussels Exhibition of 1910, 
unhappily burned down, was adorned with a well- 
painted perspective of this very region, shown with 
all its towns connected up by railways and roads, and 
presented as a bird's-eye view (or, as we may nowa- 
days say, an aeroplane view) from above the sea-coast. 
For does not this map clearly suggest that the 
economic and social unity of such new city-regions, 
such conurbations as are here described, is already 
becoming conscious to them ? The preparation and 
exhibition of such diagrammatic perspectives would 
be of no little service in making these ideas clear to 
all concerned, and in enabling the public and the 
rulers of each to realise the new situation, the new 
solidarity which are arising towards a fuller integra- 
tion, a higher unity of the body politic. The great 
maps of railway systems, which are at once a con- 
venience and an adornment of German station-halls, 
have no little value and educational influence: so, 
and far more intensively, might enlargements of the 
conurbation-maps, which we are here discussing, bring 
before the public the needed conception of a local 
within a more general citizenship. 

In conclusion, let us pass to Scotland. Here, again, 
the history and geography of popular notions, those of 
the school books on which we were brought up, and 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 39 

on which our children are still examined, are no 
longer adequate. 

G lasgow, as everybody knows, is the main centre of 
activity and population in Scotland, far outnumber- 
ing and outweighing Edinburgh ; it is the real capital 
in many respects. And Greater Glasgow in the 
fullest sense, that in which we speak of Greater 
London is something far vaster than the present 
name and burgh limits at all describe ; it includes 
practically the Clyde ports and watering-places, and 
runs far into Ayrshire, with inland burghs and 
villages not a few. It spreads far up the Clyde 
valley, indeed reaches its strenuous hands across the 
isthmus to Falkirk and Grangemouth, while its 
merchants have their villas at Stirling and beyond, 
as far as Bridge of Allan and even Dunblane. Again, 
plainly, old thinly-populated provinces are on the 
way to be covered with houses. Edinburgh has no 
doubt its marked regional individuality ; and in its 
immediate growth is, more than is commonly realised, 
with Leith and minor towns and suburbs already 
approaching half a million: it is perhaps destined, 
with due development of its not inconsiderable ad- 
jacent coalfields, to double this within the century. 
Though, from historic tradition and from present 
holiday associations, most people, even in Scotland, 
still think of the Scots as in the main a nation of 
hardy rustics, no population in the world is now so 
predominantly urban, and, as sanitary reformers 
know, none so ill-housed at that. More than half 



40 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the population of Scotland is crowded upon this 
central isthmus; and, with the approaching con- 
struction of the Clyde and Forth Canal (which is 
so plainly a matter not only of Scottish, but even of 
national, imperial, and international policy), it is 
clear that we shall have a linking up of these two 
great cities and their minor neighbours of Scotland 
into a new conurbation a bi-polar city-region indeed, 




FIG, 15. Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Forth." 

which is more and more uniting into one vast bi- 
regional capital Clyde-Forth, as we may soon learn 
to call it. 

Glasgow and Edinburgh are, of course, far remoter 
in type and spirit than their nowadays small railway 
distance implies ; and this difference, even contrast, 
is natural, inevitable, and so far permanent, for they 
are really the respective regional capitals of East and 
West Scotland, and contrasted in many ways geo- 
graphical and meteorological, racial and spiritual. To 
Glasgow indeed the contrast with Edinburgh may 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 41 

seem as great as that between Liverpool and York ; 
while a still larger contrast might be made from the 
Edinburgh point of view, as that between the main 
cities of Sweden and of Norway, of both of which 
Scotland in many ways is a condensed miniature ; say, 
a Stockholm with Upsala for Edinburgh, and for 
Glasgow a greater Bergen and Christiania. Towns 
so widely distinct in nature and race, in traditions, 
arid in social functioning and structure do not easily 
recognise that even they are but the poles of a vast 
and growing conurbation : yet here, too, the growth- 
process is at work, and tends largely to submerge 
all differences beneath its rising tide. And, broadly 
speaking, the main limit of the modern city is that 
of the hour's journey or thereby, the maximum which 
busy men can face without too great deduction from 
their day's work ; and hence it is above all with the 
constant extension and acceleration of the means of 
communication that each conurbation arises and 
extends. 

It is interesting now to return to the map and 
make our main conurbations clear, each upon its 
coalfield. Running downwards, and leaving Clyde- 
Forth to Scotland, we have in England (1) Tyne- 
Wear-Tees, (2) Lancaston, (3) West Riding, (4) South 
Riding, (5) Midlanton, (6) Waleston, each a coalfield 
with its vast conurbation ; while Greater London, 
without a coalfield, forms the seventh of our series. 
What is this but a New Heptarchy, which has been f 
growing up naturally, yet almost unconsciously to 



42 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

politicians, beneath our existing, our traditional 
political and administrative network: and plainly, 
not merely to go on as at present, straining and 
cracking and bursting this old network, but soon 
surely to evolve some new form of organisation 
better able to cope with its problems than are the 
present distinct town and county councils. What 
are the new forms to be ? 

Leaving this sphinx-riddle for the present, and 
turning once more to the map, we recognise plainly 
enough that our political friend who was " not going 
back to the Heptarchy " will have to go forward to 
it, indeed is already in it. Let him now observe 
closely, in the very middle of our map, a great 
irregular white patch practically blank of population, 
and separating Lancaston from South Riding and 
West Riding, which, indeed, already are well-nigh 
run together. This white patch represents the heights 
of the Pennines, and consequently the water supply 
of these vast and growing populations on either side. 
Here, in fact, accurately speaking in synoptic vision, 
is their " Parish Pump," one, however, no longer to 
be despised; but precisely the most important, the 
ultimate and determinant condition of population, 
and the inexorable limit of their growth. Coal will 
.still last a long time, and cotton might expand 
accordingly; but water is the prime necessity after 
[air itself, and, unlike it, is limited in quantity. Food 
can be brought for almost any conceivable population 
as long as ships can sail the seas, and we have the 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 43 

wherewithal to buy ; famine one can survive for 
months ; total starvation even for weeks ; but with- 
out water we last barely three days. Parish Pump 
indeed ! the prime necessity of regional statesmanship, 
since even of bare survival. For life and health, for 
cleanliness and beauty, for manufactures too, what 
more need be said ? Now, though our politicians are 
thus behindhand, are thus, as a class, regionally blind, 
geographically next to null, and for practical purposes 
well-nigh all mere Londoners, the elements of a real 
Parliament for these matters are developing. Witness 
notably the Health Congresses aforesaid. Thus at the 
Birkenhead Congress of 1910 there was much serious, 
and even anxious, discussion of the future of sanita- 
tion and of water supply for the Lancaston area, and 
this voiced at once by local experts and by national 
authorities like Sir William Ramsay ; of whom, as 
also the most eminent of scientific Londoners, even 
our politicians aforesaid may have heard, and may 
well stand in some fear of, if they sneer before him 
at the Parish Pump. 

Return now to the question What are the new 
social forms to be ? It is not yet safe for us to 
speculate upon this until the needful Regional Survey 
is for more advanced. One suggestion, however, is 
practical enough ; there should be, and that speedily 
and increasingly, amicable conference among all the 
representatives, rustic and urban, of the various cities 
and county-regions concerned ; and, as a matter of 
fact, various beginnings of this are being forced into 



44 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

existence by the sheer pressure of their common 
interests. Such meetings will gradually increase 
in number, in usefulness, in co-operation, and by- 
and-by take more permanent form. The old 
Borough Councils and County Councils can no 
longer separately cope with what are becoming so 
plainly yet larger Regional and Inter -Regional 
tasks, like those of water supply and sanitation 
for choice, but obviously others also. The growth 
of London and its County Council, its separate 
boroughs, is thus repeating itself; and its example 
merits study, alike for its suggestiveness and for 
its warnings. While, conversely, to the Londoner 
such .regional excursions may be suggestive. The 
contrasts of " London and the provinces," as Spend- 
ing-town and Earning- towns, again of Taxing-town 
and Paying-towns, and various others, also arise, 
and might lead him far. 

It may not yet be time to press for political re- 
arrangements : this might too readily come to mean 
premature disputes and frictions, not to speak of 
legal difficulties and expenses. But it is plainly time 
for the co-operation of the regional geographer with 
the hygienist, and of both with the concrete sociologist, 
the student of country and town, of village and city ; 
and also for the furtherance of their labours, the 
discussion of them in detail, in friendly conferences 
representative of all the various groupings and 
interests concerned. 

Since these pages were written, and indeed read at 



THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 45 

the Health Congress of 1910, a prominent minister 
has raised the question of the needed and approach- 
ing movement towards decentralisation ; and this in 
largely kindred form : while later events are pointing 
in the same direction. The preceding argument may, 
however, best be left unaltered, as on strictly civic 
grounds and of non-party character. The present co- 
operation of all the administrative bodies of Greater 
London towards the preparation of a town-plan may, 
however, be mentioned as an example which must 
soon be followed in other conurbations. 



CHAPTER III 

WORLD-CITIES AND THEIR OPENING COMPETITION 

City-regions in other countries : e.g. France, Germany, United States. 
City - evolution still only beginning and existing cities ever being 
rebuilt. Other forms of industrial aggregation : example of Norway 
in association with the recent developments of electric industries, 
from the " white coal " of mountain streams. Nature of these 
industries, and advantages to population concerned. Analogous 
case of Switzerland, of French, Italian, and other mountain districts. 
Relative backwardness and danger of this and other coal-using 
countries in realising this advent of a new industrial age, a second 
Industrial Revolution. 

So far our New Heptarchy. But if such interpreta- 
tion of the main groupings of our cities, towns, 
villages into conurbations overflowing or absorbing 
the adjacent country be a substantially correct 
description of the general trend of present-day evolu- 
tion, then we may expect to find something of the 
same process in analogous city-regions elsewhere ; it 
can scarcely be a mere island marvel. France, with 
its slow population growth, and its comparative lack 
of coalfields to raise towns from, is naturally not 
producing such vast industrial conurbations as ours, 
though around Lille, for instance, there is no small 
beginning. Yet there is a Greater Paris; the vast 
suburban quarters outside the fortifications of Paris 

46 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 47 

have: obvious and general analogies to the dormitories 
outside the present County Council London ; and 
any traveller who is patient enough to stay in his 
through carriage, and endure the round-about north- 
easterly passage by St Denis from the Gare du Nord 
to that of the P.L.M., instead of driving through the 
city from station to station, will agree that here, at 
least, is going on an urban growth of confused and 
labyrinthine squalor, little, if at all, inferior to any 
of our own ! Along the Riviera, of late years, the 
pleasure and health resorts have grown rapidly, and 
in a great many cases they are running together ; at 
the present rate our not very distant successors will see 
an almost continuous town, and of one monotonous 
type as far as man can make it, for a couple of 
hundred miles. Berlin has, of course, rapidly been 
overtaking Paris throughout the last generation ; 
and the designs of its latest town-planning com- 
petition show that it is now following the example 
of Vienna in dealing far more largely and boldly with 
its outlying suburbs than have London, or most other 
great cities. For an example of our characteristic 
British type, the development of a great conurbation 
upon a coalfield, we have no small beginnings in 
Westphalia. But here also is rapidly growing up 
a great, powerful, and in many ways magnificent 
regional capital in Diisseldorf, which was recently 
but a small " Residenzstadt," not so much bigger 
than the old village its modest name commemorates : 
it seems now plainly destined to distance Cologne 



48 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

almost as Leeds has done York. Yet the organisa- 
tion and the civic energy of these German centres so 
incomparably surpass those of Yorkshire cities or 
others that such comparisons can only be made in a 
rough and merely suggestive way. 

In the United States, with their rapid development 
of resources and corresponding increase of population, 
there is still ample room for growth ; yet even here 
cities are already flowing together ; and the Pitts- 
burgh region is but a conspicuous example of a Black 
Country, in which increase and pressure, if not fore- 
sight, must soon involve some conurban survey and 
reorganisation. How vigorously the problem of 
linking up a great regional metropolis to its sur- 
rounding towns and their province must be grasped 
is probably as yet nowhere better evidenced than has 
been shown in Mr Burnham's bold and masterful 
planning of the region around Chicago, no less than 
in his proposals for the city in itself; whatever, of 
course, be the criticisms of his suggestions in detail 
The present Greater New York, now linked up, on 
both sides, by colossal systems of communications 
above and below its dividing waters, is also rapidly 
increasing its links with Philadelphia itself no mean 
city and with minor ones without number in every 
direction possible. For many years past it has paid 
to have tramway lines continuously along the roads 
all the way from New York to Boston, so that, taking 
these growths altogether, the expectation is not 
absurd that the not very distant future will see 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 49 

practically one vast city-line along the Atlantic Coast 
for five hundred miles, and stretching back at many 
points ; with a total of, it may be, well-nigh as many 
millions of population. Again, the Great Lakes, 
with the immense resources and communications 
which make them a Nearctic Mediterranean, have 
a future, which its exponents claim may become 
world-metropolitan in its magnitude. Even of Texas 
which Europeans, perhaps even Americans, are apt 
to forget has an agricultural area comparable to that 
of France and Germany put together, and a better 
average climate it has been claimed that with in- 
tensive culture it might well-nigh feed a population 
comparable to that of the civilised world. 

Our Population-Map of the United Kingdom may 
thus be a forecast of the future of the coalfield areas 
of the United States : and the accompanying Popula- 
tion Map of the Eastern and Central Regions is thus 
but a faint sketch towards those coming conurbations 
which it is time to be preparing for. 

Of the needful water supplies of all these potential 
conurbations we leave engineers to speak ; but food 
supplies are conceivable enough, and at all standards, 
from the too generous dietary of the American hotel 
to those innumerable costermongers' barrows of 
cheap and enormous bananas which range through 
the poorer streets of New York, and grimly suggest 
a possible importation of tropical conditions, towards 
the maintenance and multiplication of an all too 

cheap proletariat. What, in fact, if our present con- 

4 



50 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

ditions of food supply and of mechanical employments 
be tending to produce for us conditions hitherto 
only realised, and in simpler ways, by the teeming 
millions of China? And what of China herself, 
already so populous, when her present introduction 
of Occidental methods and ideas has developed her 
enormous latent resources of coal, of cheap water 
communications, as well as railways and the rest ? 
Yet in this old country of ours, in so many ways 
sleepier than we can now think China herself, how 
many will still tell you that " there is no need for 
town planning, the cities are all built " ; whereas, 
taking even the Empire, and much more the world 
over, the process seems practically but beginning ; 
while have not our existing cities, for the most part, 
before long to be well-nigh built all over again ? 
True, town-planning schemes, as modest tackings-on, 
patchings and cobblings, are being considered, even 
attempted, here and there ; yet we assuredly need 
far more than these if we are even to "muddle 
through " in the ever reopening wo rid -struggle for 
existence ; far more as we realise that the supreme 
arbitrament of social survival and success is ultimately 
neither that of militarist conflicts, nor of industrial 
muddles, but of civic and regional reorganisation. In 
this the broadest views of international struggle and 
of industrial competition combine into a higher one. 

But from these visions of indefinitely numerous 
and multitudinous conurbations, each of teeming 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 51 

boroughs, it is a relief to turn away in search of some 
smaller, simpler, and surely healthier and happier 
type of social development and integration. Happily 
a new and vivid example of that also is not far to 
seek. Every school-boy knows something at least of 
the historic significance of Norway, that poorest of 
lands which, as Norse children tell, was left altogether 
without soil at the Creation, arid so has for its few 
upland farms only such few particles of soil as its 
kindly guardian angels could sweep up and bring 
thither on their wings from the leavings of the richer 
world. As some compensation, however, their many 
rivers were rich in salmon ; and these taught their 
fishermen to venture out along the calm "swan's 
path " of the fiords as sea-fishers, and in comparative 
safety to master the art of sailing, behind their long 
island-breakwater. Thus trained and equipped, their 
merchant-history, emigration-history, pirate-history, 
conqueror - history follows, with what effects on 
Europe everyone knows : but what we do not as yet 
sufficiently realise in other countries whose ideas 
of each other are seldom less than a generation 
behindhand, and generally more is how a new 
historical development in new conditions and 
destined to take new forms, may be, and actually in 
Norway is, arising once more. The electric utilisa- 
tion of a single waterfall is now yielding 150,000 
horse-power ; and though this is certainly one of the 
very greatest, there are smaller ones almost beyond 
number for a thousand miles. Norway, then which 



52 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

has so long seemed practically to have reached its small 
natural limits of wealth, industry, and population as 
to have long fallen out of all reckonings of the Great 
Powers, of which it was the very forerunner has now 
broken through these limits and begun a develop- 
ment, perhaps proportionately comparable in the 
opening century to that of our own country in the 
past one yet with what differences ? Our Industrial 
Age in its beginnings, and indeed too long in its 
continuance, turned upon getting up coal almost 
anyhow, to get up steam almost anyhow, to run 
machinery almost anyhow, to produce cheap pro- 
ducts to maintain too cheap people almost anyhow 
and these to get up more coal, more steam, more 
machinery, and more people, still almost anyhow 
and to call the result " progress of wealth and popula- 
tion." Such swift multiplication of the quantity of 
life, with correspondingly swift exhaustion of the 
material resources on which this life depends, has 
been too much as our coal-economists now and then 
sternly remind us like that of the mould upon the 
jam-pot, which spreads marvellously for its season, 
until at length there is a crowded and matted crust 
of fungus-city, full of thirsty life and laden with in- 
numerable spores, but no jam left. The comparison 
is harsh, is even hideous, yet is necessary to be 
realised : for is it not the goal to which our own and 
every other " Black Country " is hurrying that of a 
multitudinous population at too low standards of 
life ; a soil too limited for agriculture, even 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 53 

where not bricked or ashed over ; in short, of mean 
and miserable cities subsiding upon exhausted 
mines. 

From this doleful picture of the logical outcome 
of one set of conditions, turn now to image that 
arising on the opposite shores of the North Sea, from 
the streams of " white coal," each and all inexhaustible 
while the earth spins, and its winds blow over the 
sea, and the Norse mountains stand. Yet instead 
of Norway forming cities like ours upon these un- 
ending streams of energy, these for the most part 
generate but long chains of townlets, indeed of 
country villages, in which this strongest of races need 
never decline, but rather develop and renew their 
mastery of Nature and of life again as of old ; with 
everywhere the skill of their ancient dwarf-kings, 
the might of the hammer of Thor. Are there not 
here plainly the conditions of a new world-phen- 
omenon and world-impulse a Norseman aristo- 
democracy of peace which may yet eclipse all past 
achievements, whether of his ancient democracy at 
home or even (who knows ?) his aristocracy of con- 
quest and colonisation abroad among older dis- 
couraged peoples, and even his settlement of a new 
patriciate upon their comparatively exhausted lands ? 

What are the essential applications of these new 
energies, besides electric lighting and power for 
tramways, railways, etc. ? These uses are largely 
metallurgical that is, on the central lines of the 
world's progress, from the Stone Age onwards. The 



54 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

electric furnace not only gives an output of iron and 
steel, greatly cheaper (it is said already as much as 
50 per cent.) than heretofore, but of the very finest 
quality ; so that not only our British steelworks, but 
those of Pittsburgh also, must before long be feeling 
this new competition. 

The command of the new metals like aluminium, 
of the rare metals also every year becoming more 
important, which the high temperatures of the electric 
furnace give, involves further new steps in metal- 
lurgy. Again, the conditions for labour and its real 
wages, in the innumerable garden-towns and villages 
which are springing up in these conditions, each 
limited in size by that of its stream, and thus con- 
tinuous with glorious and comparatively undestroyed 
natural environment, afford an additional factor of 
competition, more permanently important than are 
those of money wages and market prices. The 
favourable situation of these new towns, mostly upon 
their fiords, is again full of advantages, and these 
vital as well as competitive. 

Again, the regularisation of streams, with the in- 
crease or formation of lakes as power reservoirs, puts 
a stop to the spring floodings, which are a frequent 
source of damage in mountain countries ; and it further 
admits of a not inconsiderable by-product, in fish 
culture. 

Further, it may be remembered how, not so many 
years ago, one of our foremost chemists, Sir William 
Crookes, called attention to the approaching scarcity 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 55 

of nitrogen for the world's wheat crops, associated 
with the rapid exhaustion of the nitrate beds of Chili, 
etc. But now the problem of utilising the nitrogen 
of the atmosphere for the production of saltpetre has 
been solved, even better than in Germany, by the 
Norse chemists and engineers. In such ways the 
country hitherto the poorest of all in agriculture, begins 
not only to develop more intensively its own soil, but 
to increase the fertility of all our Northern world. 

Such electric development, of course, is not Nor- 
wegian alone ; Sweden and Finland already begin to 
share it, and still more Switzerland, which is rapidly 
undergoing, under the influence of electric industries, 
a development fully comparable to that by which in 
the last couple of generations she has adapted herself 
to the tourists of the Western world. Down from the 
Alps, along the long mountain backbone of Italy, the 
same white collieries are opening, and from this main 
axis of the coming Industrial Europe there run out 
corresponding lines on every hand. Here France, 
which it has been so long the fashion in industrial 
Britain or Germany to think of as having fallen hope- 
lessly behind, alike in industries and population, sees 
new resources opening before her, in her large share 
of the Alps, her Northern Pyrenees, even her central 
mountain mass with its considerable river courses. 
Even Spain, with all its drought, and barrenness, and 
poverty, begins to see a new future of internal 
colonisation, compensating not a little, as her fore- 
sighted citizens already realise, for the loss of her 






56 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

colonies, that vast empire she left too undeveloped. 
Or pass eastwards. Though Austria of old failed to 
conquer Switzerland, she has her own Switzerland in 
the Tyrol, and Hungary her broad girdle of the Car- 
pathians. Similarly, and in some considerable 
measure, for the new nations of the Danube and the 
Balkans. So in Asia Minor, as for Albanians and 
their neighbours, there lies an opportunity for the 
young Turks beyond their constitution-makings at 
the centre and repressions at the circumference 
that of organising a reconstitution indeed. With 
the Turkish Empire we are, of course, entering more 
and more fully upon the region of drought ; and here 
the question arises of the desiccation of Asia and 
the evolution of its deserts. 

We cannot enter here upon the difficult and still 
unsettled question of how far this evolution of deserts 
is a cosmic process, destined sooner or later to bring 
the world into the condition upon which Mr Percival 
Lowell so vividly insists for Mars. There is also 
much reason for the view that this desiccating pro- 
cess has been due, if not to the neglect of man, at 
any rate largely aided by this ; largely, too, to the 
mischiefs of ages of war, in destroying irrigation- works 
and terraces everywhere, of which the vestiges are 
far more important and conspicuous survivals of 
antiquity than even are the temples and palaces our 
archaeologists explore. Far beyond wilful destruction 
of irrigation-works is their wastage, through that 
mingling of material neglect and fiscal extortion, to 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 57 

which the decline of the vast Turkish Empire, and 
with it the Persian also, is so largely traceable. It is 
not necessary here to inquire how far this is due to 
the ignorance of pastoral and military conquerors like 
the Turks, and how far to that passive acceptance of 
the practical unmodifiability of the Arabian desert, 
which has been so decisively expressed in the philos- 
ophy and the faith of Islam. The reason for refer- 
ring to such apparently far-away matters will become 
clear if they help us to reflect how far our own par- 
ticular racial origins and regional experience, our lack 
of experience also, and how far our particular 
established philosophy and its corresponding popular 
beliefs, may likewise interfere with our needed 
industrial and social modernisation. For after all, 
between the conservatism of the Turk and the 
conservatism of the Briton there is not so very wide 
a difference as the latter is given to concluding. 
And if any wonder how we come to such an opinion, we 
answer that it has not been formed without some con- 
tact, both provincial and metropolitan, with the Turk. 
Yet there is here no real pessimism ; for with 
Turkey, Persia, even China, showing signs of following 
the example of Japan in adopting Occidental methods 
and ideas, there is every hope that our own country 
may also follow the exhortation of its present king, 
and wake up in its turn. But, it may be said, are we 
not of all the Occidental peoples that very one whose 
industrial greatness and whose correspondingly free 
political institutions are being copied by all these 



58 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

awakening countries ? When we thus so admittedly 
lead, to suggest here that we lag may seem not even 
paradoxical, but flippant absurd, some may say. 
Yet has not our contemporary industrial majority 
roundly accused its agricultural predecessors, lords 
and peasants alike, of failing adequately to recognise 
the new order which the industrial revolution has 
been bringing about these hundred years and more ? 
Indeed, is not the thinking Conservative, however 
much he may regret the diminishing authority of this 
older ruling class, the very sharpest in reminding it 
that its defeats have been at least largely due to 
insufficiently realising the modern industrial situation? 
Now, here lies the present point that nowadays a 
new difficulty altogether has arisen namely, that of 
inducing the leaders of the present industrial world 
in their turn Liberal or Radical, Labourist or 
Socialist here matters little to realise that they are 
in presence of the actual birth and present growth of 
a new industrial order one differing scarce less com- 
pletely from the older one, in which they are so fully 
engaged, than did their industrial order from the old 
agricultural one. From our present standpoint, that 
of the evolution of cities, first before and since the 
industrial revolution, and now anew to-day, it is surely 
plain that though Lord Salisbury and Mr Balfour 
may have on the whole represented the older agri- 
cultural order, Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith, with, 
say, Mr Lloyd George and Mr Keir Hardie, have 
all been representing the Industrial and Mechanical 



WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 59 

Age, of commercial and monetary struggles, though 
of course from more or less differing approaches. 
But the present point is that a new order has been 
again arising within the vitals of this industrial order, 
to which neither its economic leaders whether of 
proletariat or propertariat nor their respective 
political exponents are yet adequately awake. 
Without Arkwright's jenny, and Watt's engine, our 
coalfields would still be sleeping, without coalmaster 
or collier, railway director or railway man. Their 
line of development is thus clear : first the advance 
of discovery and of invention, and then the application 
of the latter on ever-increasing scale ; with a corre- 
sponding development, in strength and in numbers, 
of the ranks of capital and labour. With these arises 
and sharpens their conflict of interests, which begins 
to give us the Labour member, as well as the Capital 
member; and let us hope sometimes the means of 
conciliation between them. Along with all this goes 
the development of wider theorisings in political 
economy here orthodox, there socialistic ; and finally 
the clear expression of all these rival interests and 
doctrines in the field of politics, and by the person- 
alil ies we know. But while their discussion concen- 
trates public attention, it is too much overlooked by 
all concerned that a new economic order a Second 
Industrial Revolution is once more arising, requiring 
corresponding changes in economic theories, corre- 
sponding expression in its turn. To outline this 
more fully is our problem in the next chapter. 



CHAPTEE IV 

PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 

The Industrial Age as Twofold 

A new industrial age is opening : significance of oil fuel, electric industries, 
etc. As "the Stone Age" is now distinguished into two periods, 
"Paleolithic" and "Neolithic," so the "Industrial Age" requires 
distinction into its two phases also, as " Paleotechnic" and "Neo- 
technic.'' Illustration from synoptic view of Durham. Interpreta- 
tion of protests of Romantics, Carlyle, Ruskin, etc. Conception of 
physical economics, and of "natural resources" as no longer in 
mere monetary sense. Money notations examined : passage from 
money wages to " Vital Budget " : this conception needed to build 
the neotechnic town. 

Utopias as indispensable to social thought : the escape from paleo- 
technic to neotechnic order is thus from Kakotopia to Eutopia the 
first turning on dissipating energies towards individual money gains, 
the other on conserving energies and organising environment 
towards the maintenance and evolution of life, social and individual, 
civic and eugenic. 

Interpretations of war and of struggle towards survival generally 
from present point of view. Recent advances, towards constructive 
activities, of American peace-agencies beyond European ones. 

HERE, again, this same process is beginning that of 
a new industrial age. Following James Watt, the 
Prometheus of steam, Glasgow gave us the very 
foremost of all the Prometheans of electricity in 
Lord Kelvin. Following upon the locomotive of 
Stephenson, we have motors and electric cars ; and 
upon the marine applications of Watt's engine, we 

60 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 61 

have had the gas engine from Birmingham, from 
Newcastle the turbine of Parsons, already improved 
upon ; next the application of oil fuel, the Diesel 
engine, and so on. 

Now, of all the limitations of our predominant 
middle-class and upper-class points of view, one of 
the worst is not seeing how widely different are the 
forms of labour. Not merely in their various pro- 
ducts, and in various rates of money wages, as 
economists have been wont to describe. Far beyond 
all these, different in ways far too much ignored, 
are their effects. First on the individuals who 
perform these various tasks, as physicians and psycho- 
logists now observe them : secondly, on the resultant 
types of family, of institutions and general civilisation, 
as social geographers have long been pointing out for 
simple societies, and as sociologists have now to work 
out for our complex ones. Take a simple illustration 
of the first. No one surely but can see, for instance, 
that the practical disappearance of the legion of stokers, 
which oil fuel involves, is something, physiologically 
if not politically, comparable to the emancipation of 
the galley-slaves, which similarly was brought about 
through an improvement in modern locomotion. It 
is, on the whole, well to throw people out of such 
employment. But finer issues are less obvious, and 
need tracing. A great idealist, an undeniable moral 
force like the late John Bright felt himself logically 
compelled in terms of his economic creed that of 
the then believed final machine-and-market order to 



62 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

argue in Parliament against the Adulteration Acts 
as an interference with competition, and therefore 
with the life of trade ! Whereas, the simplest, the 
least moralised or idealistic of electricians needs no 
public enthusiasms, no moral or social convictions, to 
convince him that adulteration is undesirable ; since 
every day's work in his calling has experimentally 
made him feel how a trace of impurity in his copper 
wire deteriorates its conductivity, and how even a 
trifle of dirt between contact surfaces is no trifle, 
but may spoil contact altogether. Such illustrations 
might be multiplied and developed indefinitely. But 
enough here if we can broadly indicate, as essential 
to any real understanding of the present state of the 
evolution of cities, that we clearly distinguish between 
what is characteristic of the passing industrial order, 
and that which is characteristic of the incipient one 
the passing and the coming age. Indeed, before 
many years we may say the closing and the opening 
one. 

Recall how as children we first heard of " The 
Stone Age " ; next, how this term has practically 
disappeared. It was found to confuse what are really 
two strongly contrasted phases of civilisation, albeit 
here and there found mingled, in transition ; in arrest 
or in reversion, sometimes also ; frequently also in 
collision hence we now call these the Old Stone 
Age and the New, the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. 
The former phase and type is characterised by rough 
stone implements, the latter by skilfully chipped or 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 63 

polished ones ; the former in common types and 
mostly for rougher uses, the latter in more varied 
types and materials, and for finer skills. The first 
is a rough hunting and warlike civilisation, though 
not without a certain vigour of artistic presentment, 
which later militarist or hunting types have also 
striven for, but seldom attained, and certainly not 
surpassed. The latter neolithic folk were of gentler, 
agricultural type, with that higher evolution of the 
arts of peace and of the status of woman, which, as 
every anthropologist knows, is characteristic of 
agriculture everywhere, and is so obvious save where 
artificially depressed. 

The records of these two different civilisations every 
museum now clearly shows, and they need not here 
be enlarged upon. Their use to us is towards making 
more intelligible the application of a similar analysis 
in our own times, and to the world around us. For 
although our economists have been and are in the 
habit of speaking of our present civilisation, since 
the advent of steam and its associated machinery, 
with all its technic strivings and masteries, as the 
" Industrial Age," we press for the analysis of this 
into two broadly and clearly distinguishable types 
ami phases : again of older and newer, ruder and 
finer type, needing also a constructive nomenclature 
accordingly. Simply substituting -technic for -lit hie, 
we may distinguish the earlier and ruder elements 
of the Industrial Age as Paleotechnic, the newer 
and still often incipient elements disengaging them- 



64 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

selves from these as Neotechnic : while the people 
belonging to these two dispensations we shall take 
the liberty of calling Paleotects and Neotects respec- 
tively. To the former order belong the collieries, in 
the main as yet worked ; together with the steam- 
engine, and most of our staple manufactures ; so do 
the railways and the markets, and above all the 
crowded and monotonous industrial towns to which 
all these have given rise. These dreary towns are, 
indeed, too familiar to need detailed description here ; 
they constitute the bulk of the coalfield conurbations 
we were considering in the previous chapter. Their 
corresponding abstract developments have been the 
traditional political economy on the one hand, and 
on the other that general body of political doctrine 
and endeavour which was so clearly formulated, so 
strenuously applied by the French Revolution and 
its exponents, but which in this country has gone on 
bit by bit in association with our slower and longer 
Industrial Revolution. 

To realise, first of all, in definite synoptic vision of 
a city, the change from the old regime to modern 
paleotechnic conditions, there is no more vivid 
example perhaps in the world than the view of 
Durham from the railway. We see on the central 
ridge the great medieval castle, the magnificent 
cathedral, as characteristic monuments as one could 
wish to see of the temporal and the spiritual powers 
of its old County Palatine and Diocese, with its 
Prince and Bishop, in this case one. Next see all 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 65 

around this the vast development of the modern 
mining town, with its innumerable mean yet decent 
streets, their meaner, yet decent little houses, with 
their main life carried on in kitchens and back courts, 
decent too, yet meanest of all : for here is a certain 
quiet and continuous prosperity, a comparative 
freedom from the main evils of greater cities, which 
makes this modern town of Durham, apart from its 
old cathedral and castle altogether, a veritable beauty- 
spot of the coal age, a paragon of the paleotechnic 
order. When we have added to this prosperous 
town life the Board Schools and the Carnegie Library, 
and to these the University Extension lectures on 
Political Economy and the Workers' Union lectures 
on Economic History, what is left for the heart of 
collier or his " representative " to desire in the way of 
prosperity and education (happiness, domestic and 
personal, remaining his private affair), except, indeed, 
to make these more steady and permanent through 
such legislation towards relieving unemployment and 
sickness as has been devised ? Wages, no doubt, may 
still perhaps be improved a little. The cathedral 
might be disestablished; and so on. But on all 
received principles of paleotechnic economics or 
politics, Durham is obviously approximately perfect. / 
Similarly for our larger colliery, iron, textile conurba- 
tions and towns American ones likewise. While 
the coalfield holds out, our progress seems practically 
assured ; our chosen press shall be that which can 
most clearly voice this conviction for us, and our 



66 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

politicians must be those who, by this measure or 
that opposite one, most hopefully promise to assure its 
continuance. With this organisation for industry in 
progress, and with its associated system of ideals ex- 
pressed in the other industrial towns around us, who 
can wonder at the little success with which Carlyle, 
Ruskin, and Morris have successively fulminated 
against them ? or even of the criticisms which their 
politicians and economists have never been able to 
answer ? It was, of course, easier to discredit these 
writers as " romantic," as " aesthetic," and so on, and 
to assume that science and invention were all on the 
paleotechnic side. But nowadays, thanks to further 
advance of science and of invention, we know better. 
Had Carlyle or Morris but known it (Ruskin had an 
inkling of this, and more), their view of industry was 
already far more in accordance with the physicist's 
doctrine of energy than is that of the conventional 
economics even of to-day. For after its prolonged 
darkening of counsel with economic text-books with- 
out that elementary physical knowledge which should 
underlie every statement of the industrial process- 
save perhaps at most, a reference, and that often 
depreciatory, to Prof. Stanley Jevons on solar crises, 
or on the exhaustion of our coal supplies it is really 
only with President Roosevelt's " National Resources 
Commission" that the fundamentals of national 
economy ^aTe becoming generally recognised. For 
this Commission begins with the national forester, 
GifFord Pinchot, and includes statesmen-agriculturists 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 67 

of the type of Sir Horace Plunkett, indeed has that 
leader's active personal collaboration. It happily now 
includes even the economist, albeit as a brand plucked 
from the burning and teaching a very different 
doctrine from that of his youth. These now tell their 
countrymen that to dissipate the national energies, 
as the American paleotects, of Pittsburgh or where 
you please, have been doing, is not economics but 
Waste ; and that to go on dissipating energies for 
the sake of this or that individual percentage on the 
transaction, is no longer to be approved as " develop- 
ment of resources," as the mendacious euphemism for 
it goes, but is sternly to be discouraged, as the 
national waste, the mischievous public housekeeping 
it has been all along. As such studies of the physical 
realities in economic processes go on, each industrial 
process has to be clearly analysed into its physical 
factors of material efficiency and directness on the 
one side, and its financial charges on the other. Thus, 
while we shall utilise more than ever each improve- 
ment and invention which can save energy, minimise 
friction, diminish waste or loss of time in transit, we 
shall also begin to criticise in the same spirit that 
commercial process which is implied in the great 
railway maxim of " charging what the traffic will 
bear," but which, in more scientific language, may be 
called " parasitism in transit." The paleotechnic mind 
whether of Boards of Directors or Workers 1 Unions, 
here matters little has been too much interested in 
increasing or in sharing these commercial proceeds, 



68 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and too little in that of maximising physical efficiency 
and economy all through. And, since all this applies 
to more than railways, it is scarcely to be wondered 
at that the vast improvements of modern invention 
have so largely been rendered nugatory in this general 
paleotechnic way, and not by any perversity peculiar 
to the labourers or to the capitalists alone, as they 
too cheaply convince themselves. 

The advance of science is very largely a matter of 
the advance of notations. But a notation is not 

I simply a thought-help ; it also only too easily becomes 
a thought-cage, hard to escape from. This is, in fact, 
the history of the great and marvellous arithmetical 
notation of Money, within which the paleotechnic 
mind, in all its forms and developments from school- 
boy to millionaire, from education-minister to econo- 
mist has been and is, of course in varying measure, 
cribbed, cabined, and confined. From the smallest 
Labour Union to the greatest Banking Trust, all are 
hypnotised, from their earliest education with its 
exaggeration of money arithmetic, into a special- 
ised insistence upon money gains, which practically 
amounts to a veritable obsession by these, with 
consequent practical blindness to real wealth for 
themselves and to real wages for others. For even 
where the political economist may prove he has kept 
his own mind clear, he fails to affect the popular 
folk-lore his too monetarian science has created. 

'This love of money has been broadly and boldly 
defined by one of the earliest of sociologists as " the 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 69 

root of all evil": and the strange thing which 
appears when one looks at the economic situation 
in terms of pure physical science, without any senti- 
ment at all is that this saying turns out to be 
broadly true of the world around us ; and not a little 
obvious in history as well : witness the fall of Spain, 
through her fanaticism of gold, even more than of 
the faith which that also helped to weigh down. 
The paleotect may descant as he pleases about " our 
vast; and increasing accumulations of wealth " here 
in the Bank of England, and there in the village 
Savings Banks ; but to the direct eye of the social 
surveyor, as so long before to the impassioned one 
of a Carlyle or a Ruskin, this accumulation of wealth 
remains after all too much the same : a vision for 
the most part of growing infinitudes of mean streets, 
mean houses, mean back-yards, relieved more or less 
by bigger ones, too often even duller still. 

Let us go on dissipating the national store of 
energies for individual gain ; and extraordinary results 
can undoubtedly be obtained in terms of money 
wealth. Shares by whole safefuls, goodly dividends, 
and new " savings " by unnumbered millions. Is not 
this in fact a quintessential prospectus years of 
waste - basket compressed and generalised ? the 
Plutonian Utopias of " the City " rolled into one ? 

But when these fine results come to be " realised " 
in the material sense as distinguished from the 
financial sense what are they? What is there to 
show beyond the aforesaid too mean streets, mean 



70 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



houses, and stunted lives ? Chiefly documentary 
claims upon other people's mean streets elsewhere, 
and upon their labour in the future. Debts all round 
rather than stores, in short, a minus wealth rather 
than a plus. Per contra, the neotechnic economist, 




(Photo, " Welsh Outlook.") 
FIG. 16. Miners' cottages The Huts, Senghennyd, Cardiff: fronts. 

beginning with his careful economisation of national 
resources, his care, for instance, to plant trees to 
replace those that are cut down, and if possible a 
few more, is occupied with real savings. His forest 
is a true Bank, one very different from Messrs 
Rothschild's " credit "- that is, in every ultimate issue, 
our own, as taxpayers. 

Again, under the paleotechnic order the working 
man, misdirected as he is, like all the rest of us, by his 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 71 

traditional education towards money wages instead 
of Vital Budget, has never yet had an adequate 
house, seldom more than half of what might make 
a decent one. But as the neotechnic order comes 
in its skill directed by life towards life, and for life 




(Photo, " Welsh Outlook.") 
FIG. 17. Miners' cottages The Huts, Senghennyd, Cardiff: backs. 

he, the working man, as in all true cities of the 
past, aristo-democratised into productive citizen he 
will set his mind towards house building and town 
planning, even towards city design ; and all these 
upon a scale to rival nay, surpass the past glories 
of history. He will demand and create noble streets 
of noble houses, gardens, and parks ; and before long 
monuments, temples of his renewed ideals, surpassing 
those of old. 



72 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Thus he will rapidly accumulate both civic and 
individual Wealth, that is, Wealth twofold, and both 
hereditary. It will be said even he as yet says it, 
paralysed as he still is that this is " Utopia " that 
is, practically Nowhere. It is, and should be, beyond 
the dreams of the historic Utopists, right though 




FIG. 1 8. Miners' cottages, Woodlands, Yorkshire : fronts. 

they also were in their day. For their projects of 
real wealth were based but upon the more rational 
use of the comparatively scanty resources and limited 
population of the past. But just as our paleotechnic 
money-wealth and real poverty is associated with the 
waste and dissipation of the stupendous resources of 
energy and materials, and power of using them, which 
the growing knowledge of Nature is ever unlocking 
for us, so their better neotechnic use brings with it 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 



73 



potentialities of wealth and leisure beyond past 
Utopian dreams. This time the Neotechnic order, 
if it means anything at all, with its better use of 
resources and population towards the bettering of/ 
man and his environment together, means these a? 




FIG. 19. Workers' cottages, Earswick, Yorkshire : back gardens. 

a business proposition the creation, city by city, 
region by region, of its Eutopia, each a place of 
effective health and well-being, even of glorious and 
in its way unprecedented beauty, renewing and rival- 
ling the best achievements of the past, and all this 
beginning here, there, and everywhere even where 
our paleotechnic disorder seems to have done its 
very worst. 

How can this be put yet more definitely ? Simply 



74 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

enough. The material alternatives of real economics, 
which these obsessions of money economics have been 
too long obfuscating, are broadly two, and each is 
towards realising an ideal, a Utopia. These are the 
paleotechnic and the neotechnic Kakotopia and 
E utopia respectively. The first has hitherto been 
predominant. As paleotects we make it our prime 
endeavour to dig up coals, to run machinery, to 
produce cheap cotton, to clothe cheap people, to get 
up more coals, to run more machinery, and so on ; 
and all this essentially towards " extending markets." 
The whole has been essentially organised upon a basis 
of " primary poverty " and of " secondary poverty " 
(to use Mr Rowntree's accurate terminology, ex- 
plained later), relieved by a stratum of moderate 
well-being, and enlivened by a few prizes, and com- 
paratively rare fortunes the latter chiefly estimated 
in gold, and after death. 

But all this has been with no adequate development 
of real wealth, as primarily of houses and gardens, 
still less of towns and cities worth speaking of; our 
industry but maintains and multiplies our .poor and 
dull existence. Our paleotechnic life-work is soon 
physically dissipated ; before long it is represented 
by dust and ashes, whatever our money- wages may 
have been. Moreover, though we thus have produced, 
out of all this exhaustion of the resources of Nature 
and of race, whole new conurbations, towns, and 
pseudo-cities, these are predominantly, even essenti- 
ally, of Slum character Slum, Semi-slum or Super- 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 75 

slum, as we shall see more fully later each, then, a 
Kakotopia as a whole ; and in these the corresponding 
development of the various types of human deteriora- 
tion congruent with such environment. Within this 
system of life there may (and do, of course) arise 
palliatives, and of many kinds, but these do not affect 
the present contrast. 

The second alternative, however, also remains 
open, and happily has now its material beginnings 
everywhere that of the nascent neotechnic order. 
Whenever with anything like corresponding vigour 
and decision to that which the paleotects have shown, 
once and again, as notably at the coming on of the 
machine age, the railway age, the financial age, and 
now the militarist one we make up our minds, as 
some day before long we shall do, to apply our con- 
structive skill, our vital energies, towards the public 
conservation instead of the private dissipation of 
resources, and towards the evolution instead of the 
deterioration of the lives of others, then we shall 
discern that this order of things also " pays," and this 
all the better for paying in kind. That is, in having 
houses and gardens, and of the best, with all else that 
is congruent with them, towards the maintenance 
and the evolution of our lives, and still more of our 
children's. Then in a short, incredibly short, time 
we, and still more they, shall have these dwellings, 
and with them the substantial and assured, the whole- 
some and delightful, contribution to the sustenance 
of their inhabitants which gardens, properly under- 



76 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

stood and worked, imply. The old sociologists, in 
their simple societies, saw more clearly than we ; but 
as we recover their rustic and evolutionary point of 
view we may see that also for ourselves " Whatso- 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap " at any 
rate shall be reaped, by his successors if not by 
himself. During the paleotechnic period this has 
been usually understood and preached on as a curse. 
From the neotechnic standpoint it is a blessing, 
manifestly rooted in the order of Nature. For why 
not increasingly sow what is best worth reaping ? 

The life and labour of each race and generation of 
men are but the expression and working out of their 
ideals. Never was this more fully done than in this 
paleotechnic phase, with its wasteful industry and its 
predatory finance and its consequences, (a) in 
dissipation of energies, (b) in deterioration of life, are 
now becoming manifest. Such twofold dissipation 
may most simply be observed upon two of its main 
lines ; that of crude luxuries and sports, and the 
" dissipations " these so readily involve in the moral 
sense ; and, secondly, through war. The crude luxury 
is excused, nay, psychologically demanded, by the 
starvation of paleotechnic life in well-nigh every vital 
element of beauty or spirituality known and valued 
by humanity hitherto. Thus to take only one of the 
very foremost of our national luxuries, that of getting 
more or less alcoholised this has been vividly defined, 
in a real flash of judicial wisdom, as " the quickest 
way of getting out of Manchester." 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 77 

Similarly, War and its preparations are explained, 
we may even say necessitated, by the accepted 
philosophy and the social psychology of our paleo- 
technic cities, and particularly of the metropolitan 
ones. In the first place, war is but a generalising of 
the current theory of competition as the essential 
factor of the progress of life. For, if competition be, 
as we are told, the life of trade, competition must 
also be the trade of life. What could the simple 
naturalists, like Darwin and his followers, do but 
believe this ? and thence project it upon Nature and 
upon human life with a new authority ! The paleo- 
technic philosophy is thus complete ; and trade 
competition, Nature competition, and war competi- 
tion, in threefold unity, have not failed to reward 
their worshippers. Thus the social mind, of the said 
cities especially, but thereafter of the whole nation 
they influence, is becoming characterised and 
dominated by an ever-deepening state of diffused and 
habitual fear. This, again, is the natural accumula- 
tion, the inevitable psychological expression of 
certain very real evils and dangers, though not those 
must commonly expressed. First, of the inefficiency 
and wastefulness of paleotechnic industry, with 
corresponding instability and irregularity of employ- 
ment, which are increasingly felt by all concerned ; 
second, the corresponding instability of the financial 
system, with its pecuniary and credit illusions, 
which are also becoming realised ; and third, the 
growing physical slackness or deterioration -- un- 



78 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

fitness anyhow which we all more or less feel in our 
paleotechnic town life, which therefore must more 
and more make us crouch behind barriers and cry 
for defenders. Hence, in fact, Tennyson's eulogy of 
the Crimean War, and many other earlier and later 
ones like, say, Ruskin's. For as imagined military 
dangers become real ones, so far from increasing fear, 
they at once exhilarate and invigorate our ebbing 
courage. Of all the " Merrie England " of the past, 
there was but one town which habitually boasted the 
epithet ; and that was " Merrie Carlisle," just because 
it guarded the marches, and stood to bear the first 
shock of Scottish raids or invasions ; and first sent out 
its hardy sons, now to provoke these, now meet them 
with counter-initiative. Similarly, it is not in the many 
coast cities lying open to bombardment, but at London 
and this not simply but deeply because it is practi- 
cally unattackable, besides having the assurance of 
immediate concentration of all the national resources 
of defence that there, of all our cities, the yellow 
journalist can most readily exploit the popular fears. 
On grounds like these, which have been only too 
obvious in other places and times, serious pessimism 
as naturally arises. Yet here our pessimism is but 
relative ; for it needs no war, but only the appearance 
of neotechnic art and science to evoke a correspond- 
ing courage. Hence, for instance, the joyousness of 
the aviator amid his desperate risks ; and hence, 
largely, the calm of Paris throughout the long and 
threatening Morocco negotiations of 1911. 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC f 79 

Since this paleotechnic war - obsession stands so 
definitely in the~~way of city betterment, let us 
put the criticism of it in a somewhat different 
way. 

Among lagging peoples agriculture declines ; and, 
with the lowering of the rustic life, its cognate skills 
and arts, its joys and spirit, its very health decay 
also. A vicious circle arises and widens ; drudgeries, 
luxurious and servile, mean, even abject, appear and 
deepen, and replace the old simple fellowship in 
labour ; indulgence or indolence, orgies followed by 
ennui and apathy, replace rest. Classes become 
fixed as status through militarism's return ; taboos 
arise and strengthen ; and sex, the natural and 
fundamental spring of the moral life in both sexes, 
perverts into the dreams and dances of strange sins. 
Of all such " progress," such "wealth," such "peace," 
men weary. The old courage, which in their rustic 
fathers had faced the chances of life, and mastered 
these through the courses of Nature, now finds a 
main outlet in gambling ; and this increasingly 
contaminates legitimate commerce. The ruling class 
thus becomes increasingly one of wealth, with a 
corresponding increase of types of populace, sub- 
missively ready for any service whatsoever, if only 
wages be forthcoming, and finding its hope and 
ecstasy of life in the prospect of also occasionally 
getting something for nothing, like their betters at 
that game. 

The older rustic castes, high and low, less apt for 



80 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

such modern life, are yet absorbed and enrolled by it, 
and become guardians and functionaries within, or 
enter the military caste for external service. Paleo- 
technic " order " is thus completed, and at the expense 
of progress ; as the history of Russia, of Austria, of 
Prussia has so often shown us ; and, as they tell us, 
ours has increasingly been showing them. In each such 
country, and even in its metropolis, though so largely 
thus created and maintained, the spark of soul which 
is in every man at length begins to sink within him 
altogether, or else to flare out into social discontent, 
it may be with mutterings of revolt. The official 
orator and bard appear also ; as social medicine-men 
they must at all hazards again arouse manhood, 
courage, be this even through fear. Thus, fevered 
with cold and hot, the paleotects run to and fro ; they 
invent new myths of terror, their guardians new war- 
dances ; those bring forth their treasure, and these 
build vast and vaster temples to the fear-gods. They 
carve their clubs, they lengthen and crowd their war- 
canoes, and one day they sail forth to battle. Be this 
for the time crowned with victory and glory, with 
mastery and empire, these have in them no few 
germs of decay, which also grow towards their ripen- 
ing. Is not this, in broadly summarised outline and 
at its simplest, the anthropology of half the South 
Seas, even the history of the old pirate and berserk 
glories of Scandinavia ? The only touch of freshness 
remaining for such an epitome is that this, in its 
fuller outline as above, is what the Scandinavian 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 81 

peoples are__now thinking and saying of us, "The 
Gre:at Powers." For now the Norsemen are in an 
otherwise evolving frame of mind, with correspond- 
ingly different phase of life, different conception of 
its defence, different practice towards its survival. 
Saved by their poverty of natural resources, as we 
used till lately to think, or by good hap, as it now 
appears, from the modern industrial crowdings, which 
we, in our terms of mere magnitude, call cities, they 
are entering upon the development of culture-cities, 
which already, in terms of quality of life and of 
civilisation alike, are actually and proportionally in 
advance of ours, even though comparatively favour- 
able examples be taken. Twenty-five years ago it 
could be said by one Edinburgh man to another : 
" There is more new music and live science in little 
Bergen than in big Edinburgh." And now Grieg 
and Nansen are known along the whole chain of 
villages and townlets whose electric lights twinkle 
nightly from Tromso down and round to Christiania 
itself, known even to us as well. Once, indeed, our 
Scottish singers and thinkers also were known 
throughout their land and beyond : but that was in 
times of comparative poverty, before these days of 
" business " and " education," now alike so illusory in 
their numerical estimations. 

In summary, then, the struggles of war are not so 
essential to the nature of society as many nowadays 
have come to believe ; nor even when they occur are 

they so much a matter of big battalions. 

6 



82 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Without entering in detail into the social factors 
of war, which would expand these few paragraphs 
into a volume, it is enough here to insist upon the 
thesis of this chapter that our essential struggle for 
existence at present demands a view-point different 
from and larger than that of militarists. 

Let us give these every credit for their measure of 
encouragement to neotechnic skill and invention, and 
for the spirit of sacrifice they inculcate towards the 
social weal ; but let them also realise that the present 
main struggle for existence is not that of fleets and 
armies, but between the Pal eotechnic_and Neotechnic 
order. And this not merely as regards our manu- 
facturing productivity, upon which some, to do them 
justice, insist, but yet more throughout our rural and 
our urban life. Most simply stated, as we rebuild 
our cities as well as our fleets, as we modernise our 
universities and colleges, our culture-institutes and 
schools, as we have sought to do our Dreadnoughts, 
there will be far less fear of war and far more 
assurance of survival in whatever issue. And con- 
versely, failing this needed uplift of our general level 
of civilisation, each added weight of armour but helps 
to keep it down. 

The preceding becomes clearer when we turn from 
the dramatically exaggerated rivalries of Prussian 
and British militarists, or even from the too purely 
sentimental protests, or the too coldly legalist 
endeavours of European Peace and Arbitration 
Societies, to the increasing Peace Movements of the 



PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 83 

United States. It is too soon to forecast whether 
Mr Carnegie's colossal foundation is to be helped or 
hindered towards concrete endeavours by the com- 
pleteness of the bureaucratic and academic organisa- 
tion it has announced ; but the smaller International 
Peace Foundation of Boston, under the excellent 
guidance of Mr and Mrs Edwin D. Mead, has clearly 
a side towards constructive peace ; and so, there 
seems ground for hoping, with Mr Norman Angell's 
active and growing propaganda, and the associated 
new Garton Foundation. The same conception has 
also been emphasised by Jane Addams, that true 
abbess of Chicago, in whom America possesses such 
a rare combination of social experience, generous 
feeling, intellectual grasp and insight, and driving 
force. As such women, such constructive pacifists, 
enter and lead the incipient civic and town-planning 
movement, their heavy-armed and bucklered men-folk 
will at length learn to grasp the trowel also ; and next 
begin to lay their panoply aside. Through Region 
and City, and in course of their revivance and 
development, lies the peaceful yet strenuous way 
of survival and evolution. 



CHAPTER V 

WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 

The transition from paleotechnic to neotechnic in actual progress around 
us ; yet need of strongly emphasising these two types of Evolution 
as Inferno and Eutopia respectively. Necessity of ideal conceptions 
for every science : examples of this : need, therefore, of Paradise 
and Inferno for sociology and civics no less than for theology and 
psychology. 

The beauty of cities is of no mere sentimental interest : the aesthetic 
factor is recognised in war, in medicine, as at once a symptom of 
efficiency and health, and an aid to them. The limitation of past 
romantic criticisms of paleotechnic cities is thus avoided. 

The cleansing of the city ; starting from its mountain and moor- 
land water-supply area, and proceeding inwards to meet town- 
planning extensions. These extend naturally star-wise along main 
thoroughfares, leaving unbuilt rustic areas between. These kept 
from growing together by here placing schools, playgrounds, allot- 
ments, gardens, etc. Value of opportunities of activity for youth, 
and for citizenship : civic volunteering. 

Cleansing of slums ; slum-gardens, and creation of open spaces. 
As larger factories, breweries, etc., move to environs, small work- 
shops may be grouped into their place, and sites thus left clear for 
open spacing. Needed concentration of garages ; demolition of un- 
necessary mews ; formation of garden-courts, etc. Such minor 
changes prepare for greater. Poseidon at Dunfermline. 

IN Chapter II. we viewed our immense coalfield city- 
groups, our conurbations, as in the process of in- 
definite growth ; while in the next chapter we pre- 
sented the threatening arrest of the lower industry 
and cheaper life of our own and kindred lands, not 
only by internal exhaustion of coalfields, or by com- 

84 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 85 

petition upon lower levels, but rather by competition 
upon a higher one that of the neotechnic order, now 
so plainly arising in other lands Norway being but 
the; best example, as having no paleotechnic develop- 
ment to speak of. 

Yet, as already indicated, and as the reader must 
once and again have felt this neotechnic order is 
open to us also ; we have had no small part in 
initiating it. Where better may this advance than 
in a land, one of the best situated of any, still of 
cheap and abundant coal, of easy communications, of 
ample and industrious population ? not to speak of 
resources still only opening, like water-courses and 
peit-bogs, or of those yet untouched, like winds and 
tides. Each inventor is busy with his part of this 
complex task ; and the integration of such progresses 
is one main aspect of the civic movement. 

Since cities are thus in transition, is a defence needed 
of this two-fold presentment, this sharply marked 
forking of the path of evolution industrial, social, 
civic ? Our general view of the paleotechnic city 
has been anything but a roseate one : yet the half 
has not been said. Its evils as per its reporters' 
columns, its realistic novels, its problem plays are 
here viewed as congruent with its industrial and 
commercial level, and thus normal to it, not remov- 
able while it persists, whether by statesmen or by 
philanthropists, who, alike too much, but poultice 
symptoms. A view surely pessimistic enough ! Yet 
this pessimism is but apparent ; its faith is in the 



86 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

order of Nature ; and this, in lowered functions, in 
diseased conditions, does give us disease. But, as we 
improve conditions, and with them vitalise functions, 
Nature gives us, must give us, health and beauty 
anew renewing, it may be surpassing, the best 
records of old. 

The paleotechnic order should, then, be faced and 
shown at its very worst, as dissipating resources and 
energies, as depressing life, under the rule of machine 
and mammon, and as working out accordingly its 
specific results, in unemployment and misemploy- 
ment, in disease and folly, in vice and apathy, in 
indolence and crime. All these are not separately 
to be treated, as our too specialised treatments of 
them assume, but are logically connected, inseparably 
connected, like the symptoms of a disease ; they are 
worked out, in sequent moves, upon the chessboard 
of life. They even tend to become localised upon the 
chequers of a town plan, and thus become manifest to 
all as its veritable Inferno. Yet, with the contrasted 
development of the normal life, no less continuous 
moves of ascent appear, no less clear and definite 
city-development also. Our town plans are thus not 
merely maps but also symbols, a notation of thought 
which may concretely aid us towards bettering the 
towns of the present, and thus preparing for the 
nobler cities of a not necessarily distant future. 

It may, again, be said, each of these cities is a 
logical dream : the city is not so bad as your Inferno, 
nor is it ever likely to be as good as your Utopia. 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 87 

So far admitted. Every science works with ideal con- 
cepts, like the mathematician's zero and infinity, like 
the geographer's directions north, south, east, and 
west and can do nothing without these. True, the 
mathematician's progress towards infinity never gets 
him there, nor do the geographer's journey ings, the 
astronomer's search attain the ultimate poles. Still, 
without these unattainable directions, these cardinal 
ideals, who could move from where he stands, save to 
sink down into a hole ? So far, then, from losing our- 
selves, either in the gloom of the paleotechnic Inferno 
or before the neotechnic Eutopia of the coming city, 
these extremes are what enable us to measure and 
to criticise the city of the present, and to make 
provision for its betterment, its essential renewal. 

" Here or nowhere is our Utopia " ; and our pre- 
sentments of the city at its worst, in depressing 
shadow, or again at its best, at brightest dawn, are 
but the needful chiaroscuro. The hell and heaven of 
the theologian may have lost their traditional mean- 
ing, their old appeal to the multitude, yet may all 
the more for us here renew their significance. When 
they asked Dante, "Where didst thou see Hell?" 
he answered, " In the city around me," as indeed the 
whole structure and story of the Inferno shows. And 
correspondingly, like plainer men, like simpler poets, 
he built his Paradise around his boyhood's love. 

Absolutely, then, as zero and infinity are indispens- 
able for the mathematician, so hell and heaven are 
" the necessary stereoscopic device " of the social 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

thinker, much as of his predecessor, the theologian. 
Even the material presentments of these tremendous 
energies, dissipated and destructive in the one ; 
orderly magnificence of environment and perfection 
of life in the other are concretely applicable, are 
alike logically necessary for our economic and civic 
studies. Given the everyday life of our towns, 
at one time we see their brighter aspects, but at 
another we feel their extending glare and gloom. 
V We say with Shelley, " Hell is a city much like 
London " ; we see how slow must be our journey out 
of its Valley of the Shadow. 

So, again, with the traditional psychologic present- 
ments of hell and heaven here of agony, of rage, of 
hatred, of despair and frost ; or there of joys, of ideal 
fellowship, of individual ecstasy. 

Hence are not pessimist and optimist each right, 
and each even in his extremest way ? Yet nearer 
truth than either the image of the Inferno or of 
Paradise is that of Purgatory ; for before us is the 
renewal of a great social hope ; behind us the dis- 
appointment and the suffering of innumerable falls. 

Yet less fiery presentment of the city's life-process 
is needed than any of these sternly mythopoetic ones. 
What better, then, than Blake's ? a veritable town- 
planner's hymn : 

" I will not cease from mental strife, 

Nor shall my sword fall from my hand, 
Till I have built Jerusalem 

Within this green and pleasant land ! " 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 

Now, as regards the Beauty of Cities. Those who 
are most in the habit of calling themselves " practical," 
to maintain this character are also wont too easily to 
reckon as " unpractical " whatever advances of science 
or of art they have not yet considered, or which tend 
to disturb the paleotechnic set of working conventions. 
Hence they so easily say of us town planners and city 
revivers, "All these prettifications may perhaps do 
very well for Continental cities ; but after all they 
are mere luxuries, and won't pay us here," and so on. 
Now, if anyone in that mind considers the argument 
of these pages, he will find that what they are 
primarily concerned with is very different from what 
he expects ; and that our problem is not prettifica- 
tion, not even architecture, mistress of the arts though 
she be but what practical men men of business, 
men of politics, men of war consider to be the most 
practical of all : namely, their survival, at once local 
and regional, national and imperial, in the present 
intensifying struggle for existence, and this in com- 
petition with other countries ; and with Germany for 
choice, since their thoughts at present turn so much 
that way. This fiercely practical reader will also find 
that all this is discussed without any more reference 
to {esthetic considerations than are given to them, say, 
at the War Office, or at the nearest Public Health 
Office Bureau. The utmost difference is that at 
places in such grim earnest as these they do know 
the significance of cleanliness, good order, good looks. 
They know these as the best and most obvious of 



90 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

symptoms, as the outcome, the expression of health 
and well-being, alike for a child or for a regiment, 
for a home or for a city ; while our manufacturing 
and our commercial world, and its traditional econo- 
mists as yet do not, with exceptions still so rare as to 
be practically little more than individual ones. 

Such individuals the practical man as yet fails to 
understand for what they really are pioneers of the 
incipient neotechnic order. For does he not commonly 
say, " All very well for them ; they can afford it ! " 
thus missing the fact that their sense of order and 
efficiency, their desire of fitness and seemliness, and 
their diffusion of these throughout their whole concern, 
and not only in but by those who serve in it, are 
vital factors of their superiority ; factors by which 
their already often conspicuous business success over 
those of more "practical" competitors, may, as a 
matter of contemporary history, be often and very 
largely explained. Those few great industrialists 
of the Continent, like Godin at Guise, Krupp in 
Germany, Van Marken in Holland ; of America, 
like Patterson or Fels ; of England, like Lever, 
Cadbury, and Rowntree who have done best by their 
workers, have also been all the better served by them, 
as their eminence, alike in efficiency of output and in 
resultant fortunes, plainly enough shows. It has 
long been known that to get the best work out of a 
horse, one must not put the worst in. The same has, 
in comparatively recent times, been discovered to 
hold good of the soldier, of the sailor, even in the 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 91 

long-depressed mercantile marine. So why should 
the great paleotechnic world be so slow in learning 
this lesson, and be so loyal, so sentimentally self- 
sacrificing to their economic superstitions as to leave 
the few neotechnic employers to make their fortunes, 
not a little through their application of it ? 

None will deny that the military world has always 
known the value of aesthetic appeals, and these of 
many and magnificent kinds, as a means of increasing 
alike its numbers and the efficiency of these. But it 
is a main disaster of our modern, i.e. paleotechnic, 
industry that our practical men are so largely blind 
to these considerations in their own dealings, and that 
they even pride themselves upon their limitations. 
The name " practical " which they so habitually arro- 
gate to themselves is but a sophism, self-deceptive 
though it be ; for where they really find their argu- 
ments and take their refuge is in the utilitarian philo- 
sophy. This it is which is the real inspiration, the 
sole justification of their practice. They think it 
strong because it still survives, despite the various 
and vivid protests of nineteenth-century romance and 
sentiment, or rather of what to them but seemed so. 
What they as yet fail to realise is that, when weighed 
in the balances of the sciences, their philosophy is 
found but futilitarian, or worse. For the physicist 
their " development of resources," their " progress of 
a district," is too much the wasteful dissipation of the 
energies of Nature ; to the biologist and physician the 
increasing numbers they boast as " progress of popu- 



92 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

lation " are too obviously in deterioration rather than 
in progressive evolution. Nor are these criticisms of 
physics or of public health the sternest. The sociol- 
ogist as historian has still fully to explain the practical 
man to himself. He has to analyse out the various 
factors which have gone to the making of him and 
his philosophy together the uprooted rustic, the 
machine-driven labourer, and each as a half-starveling, 
too much even of the necessary food, and yet more 
of the good of life the soured and blighted puritan 
degenerating into mammonised fanatic the revolu- 
tionary and radical politician fossilising into doctrinaire. 
It cannot be too often repeated, too frequently pre- 
sented in different ways, that the self-satisfied 
" practical man " who looks down upon all our hopes 
of the redemption and ennoblement of his industrial 
and commercial world towards civic and social aims 
as " mere sentiment," is himself the victim of senti- 
ments gone wrong; nay, that his ledger-regulated 
mind is too often but an obsession of arithmetic, and 
his life of respectable acquisitiveness but its resulting 
Vitus' Dance, conducted by " the least erected fiend 
that fell." 

Beauty, whether of Nature or art, has too long been 
without effective defence against the ever- advancing 
smoke-cloud and machine-blast and slum-progress of 
paleotechnic industry. Not but that her defenders 
have been of the very noblest, witness notably Carlyle, 
Ruskin, Morris, with their many disciples ; yet they 
were too largely romantics right in their treasuring 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 93 

of the world's heritage of the past, yet wrong in their 
reluctance, sometimes even passionate refusal, to 
admit the claims and needs of the present to live and 
labour in its turn, and according to its lights. So 
that they in too great measure but brought upon 
themselves that savage retort and war-cry of " Yah ! 
Sentiment ! " with which the would-be utilitarian has 
so often increased his recklessness towards Nature, 
and coarsened his callousness to art. The romantics 
have too often been as blind in their righteous anger 
as were the mechanical utilitarians in their strenuous 
labour, their dull contentment with it. Both have 
failed to see, beyond the rude present, the better 
future now dawning in which the applied physical 
sciences are advancing beyond their clumsy and noisy 
first apprenticeship, with its wasteful and dirty begin- 
nings, towards a finer skill, a more subtle and more 
economic mastery of natural energies ; and in which 
these, moreover, are increasingly supplemented by a 
corresponding advance of the organic sciences, with 
their new valuations of life, organic as well as human. 
In their day, when education had withered down 
into mere memorisings for senile examining boards, 
for torpid bureaucracies, neither party could foresee 
the rebound which is now beginning towards the 
reassertion of the freedom and uniqueness of the 
individual mind, towards the guidance of its unfolding 
witness, as a symptom of this, the world -wide 
interest in the teaching method of Dr Montessori. 
In an age of extremest individualism, which had been 



94 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

necessitated by the escape from outworn trammels, 
neither foresaw that return of the sense of human 
fellowship and helpfulness which promises to rekindle 
the heart of religion ; and still less that renascence of 
citizenship, that reconstruction of the City, on which 
we are now entering, and which inaugurates a new 
period of social and of political evolution. Too much 
lost by our predecessors of the industrial age, and as 
yet all too seldom realised by ourselves, the returning 
conception and ideal of Citizenship is offering us a 
new start-point of thought and labour. Here, in fact, 
is a new watchword, as definite, even more definite, 
'than those of liberty, wealth, and power, of science 
and of mechanical skill, which have so fascinated 
our predecessors; one, moreover, transcending all 
these one enabling us to retain them, to co-ordinate 
them with a new clearness, and towards the 
common weal. 

From this standpoint the case for the conservation 
of Nature, and for the increase of our accesses to her, 
must be stated more seriously and strongly than is 
customary. Not merely begged for on all grounds 
of amenity, of recreation, and repose, sound though 
these are, but insisted upon. On what grounds? 
In terms of the maintenance and development of 
life ; of the life of youth, of the health of all, which 
is surely the very foundation of any utilitarianism 
worth the name ; and further, of that arousal of the 
mental life in youth, of its maintenance through age, 
which must be a main aim of higher utilitarianism, 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 95 

and is a main condition of its continued progress 
towards enlightenment. 

At the very outset (Chapter II.) we saw the need 
of protecting, were it but for the prime necessity of 
pure; water supply, what remains of hills and moor- 
lands between the rapidly growing cities and con- 
urbations of modern industrial regions for those of 
Lancashire and Yorkshire, for instance, just as for 
Glasgow the district around Loch Katrine. 

Plainly, the hygienist of water supply is the true 
utilitarian ; and hence, even before our present 
awakening of citizenship, he has been set in authority 
above all minor utilitarians, each necessarily of 
narrower task and of more local vision engineering, 
mechanical and chemical, manufacturing and mone- 
tary and has so far been co-ordinating all these into 
the public service. But with this preservation of 
mountains and moorlands comes also the need of 
their access : a need for health, bodily and mental 
together. For health without the joys of life of 
which one prime one is assuredly this nature-access 
is bat dullness ; and this we begin to know as a main 
way of preparation for insidious disease. With this, 
again, comes forestry: no mere tree-cropping, but 
sylviculture, arboriculture too, and park-making at 
its greatest and best. 

Such synoptic vision of Nature, such constructive 
conservation of its order and beauty towards the 
health of cities, and the simple yet vivid happiness 
of its holiday-makers (whom a wise citizenship will 



96 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

educate by admission, not exclusion) is more than 
engineering : it is a master-art ; vaster than that of 
street planning, it is landscape making ; and thus it 
meets and combines with city design. 

But the children, the women, the workers of the 
town can come but rarely to the country. As 
hygienists, and utilitarians, we must therefore bring 
the country to them. While our friends the town 




FIG. 20. Town->Country : Country->Town. 

planners and burgh engineers are adding street beyond 
street, and suburb beyond suburb, it is also for us to 
be up and doing, and "make the field gain on the 
street, not merely the street gain on the field." For 
all the main thoroughfares out from the city (hence- 
forth, we hope, to be boulevards, and even more) and 
around every suburban railway station, the town 
planner is arranging his garden village, with its own 
individuality and charm; but we, with our converse 
perspective, coming in from country towards town, 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 97 

have to see to it that these growing suburbs no longer 
grow together, as past ones have too much done. 
Tow as must now cease to spread like expanding ink- 
stains and grease-spots : once in true development, 
they will repeat the star-like opening of the flower, 
with green leaves set in alternation with its golden 
rays. 

The city parks, which are among the best monu- 
ments and legacies of our later nineteenth- century 
municipalities and valuable, useful, often beautiful 
though they are, have been far too much influenced 
by the standpoint natural to the prosperous city 
fathers who purchased them, and who took them 
over, like the mansion-house parks they often were, 
each with its ring-fence, jealously keeping it apart 
from a vulgar world. Their lay-out has as yet too 
much continued the tradition of the mansion-house 
drives, to which the people are admitted on holidays, 
and by courtesy ; and where the little girls may sit 
on the grass. But the boys? They are at most 
granted a cricket-pitch, or lent a space between foot- 
ball goals, but otherwise are jealously watched, as 
potential savages, who on the least symptom of their 
natural activities of wigwam-building, cave-digging, 
stream-damming, and so on must instantly be 
chevied away, and are lucky if not handed over to 
the police. 

Now, if the writer has learned anything from a life 
largely occupied with nature-study and with education, 
it is that these two need to be brought together, and 



98 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 




WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 99 

this through nature-activities. But though there is 
obviously nothing more important either for the 
future of industry or for the preservation of the 
State, than vigorous health and activity, guided by 
vivid intelligence we have been stamping out the 
very germs of these by our policeman-like repression, 
both in school and out of it, of those natural boyish 
instincts of vital self-education, which are always con- 
structive in impulse and in essence, however clumsy 
and awkward, or even mischievous and destructive 
when merely restrained, as they commonly have 
been, and still too much are. 

It is primarily for lack of this touch of first- 
hand rustic experience that we have forced young 
energy into hooliganism ; or, even worse, depressed 
it below that level. Whereas the boy-scout move- 
ment already triumphantly shows that even the 
young hooligan needs but some living touch of 
active responsibility to become much of a Hermes ; 
and, with reconstructive opportunities and their 
vigorous labours, we shall next make of him a 
veritable Hercules. 

With this dawning reclamation of our school- 
system, hitherto so bookish and enfeebling, there is 
coming on naturally the building of better schools- 
open air schools for the most part ; and henceforth, 
as far as may be, situated upon the margins of these 
open spaces. With these, again, begin the allotments 
and the gardens which every city improver must 
increasingly provide the whole connected up with 



100 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 




WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 101 

tree-planted lanes and blossoming hedgerows, open 
to birds and lovers. 

The upkeep of all this needs no costly increase of 
civic functionarism. It should be naturally under- 
taken by the regenerating schools and continuation 
classes, and by private associations too without 
number. What better training in citizenship, as well 
as opportunity of health, can be offered any of us 
than in sharing in the upkeep of our parks and 
gardens? Instead of paying increased park and 
school rates for these, we should be entering upon one 
of the methods of ancient and of coming citizenship, 
and with this of the keeping down of taxes, by paying 
at least this one of our social obligations increasingly 
in time and in service rather than in money. Thus 
too we shall be experimentally opening our eyes 
towards that substantial Resorption of Govern- 
ment, which is the natural and approaching reaction 
from the present multiplication of officialism, always 
so costly at best. 

People volunteer for war ; and it is a strange and 
a dark superstition that they will not volunteer for 
peace. On the contrary, every civic worker knows 
that, with a little judicious inquiry and management, 
any opportunity which can be found for public service 
is not very long of being accepted, if only the leader- 
ship for it can be given : that is still scarce, but grows 
with exercise and service. Thus before long our 
constructive activities would soon penetrate into the 
older existing town, and with energies Herculean 



102 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

indeed cleansing its Augean stables in ways which 
municipal cleaning departments, responsible to the 
backward taxpayer, have not yet ventured upon to 
a degree of washing and whitewashing on which the 
more bacteriologically informed rising generation will 
soon insist. In " dirty Dublin," for instance, this 
civic volunteering is making conspicuous and effective 
beginnings. 

But beyond these mere cleansings, we need both 
destructive and constructive energy. Nowhere better 
shall we find the smaller open spaces and people's 
gardens of the opening decade than in the very heart 
of the present slums. In the " Historic Mile " of Old 
Edinburgh, that most overcrowded and difficult of 
slums, the " Open Spaces Survey " of our Outlook 
Tower committee shows there are no less than 
seventy-six open spaces, with a total area of ten acres, 
lately awaiting reclamation, and of these already an 
appreciable proportion are now being gardened, 
year by year all through voluntary agencies, of 
course, though now approved, and at various points 
assisted, by city departments and officials. This 
movement has lately been adopted by the Women's 
Health Association of Ireland, and such beginnings 
are in progress, with skilled leadership, in Dublin, 
London, and other cities. 

Towards this reclamation of the slums, our in- 
dustrialists and town planners have next their far 
larger opportunity. The innumerable and com- 
plicated muddle of workshops, large and small, which 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 



103 



at present so largely and so ineffectively crowd up 
the working-class quarters of our towns, plainly 




FIG. 23. A children's garden in Old Edinburgh. 

suggest, and will richly reward, a large measure of 
thoughtful replanning. Many of our large industries 
factories, breweries, and so on, as experience already 
shows, may with great advantage be moved to 



104 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

appropriate situations in the country, and in this 
way leave spacious buildings, which may often readily 
be adapted for the accommodation and grouping of 
smaller industries. Thus would be set free these 
minor workshops, largely for demolition, and their sites 
for open spacing, with a gain to health, to children's 




FIG. 24. Confusion 01 small workshops behind modern working- 
class dwellings in Edinburgh. 

happiness, and therefore to civic economy and pro- 
ductivity, which would rapidly repay the city for the 
whole transaction. Hence of this the expense might, 
most fairly of all outlays, be charged for redemption 
during the generation now opening. 

For a concrete illustration, let me take the well- 
known case of the West Princes Street Gardens of 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 105 

Edinburgh. These as yet retain the bounds of their 
former private ownership ; but the map of the afore- 
said open-spaces committee for Old Edinburgh shows 
how, as they already sweep round the castle, they may 
next be made practically continuous with some of our 
slum gardens thus bringing public beauty into the 
very heart of what was lately, or still is, private 
squalor. 

Mews, again, are rapidly becoming obsolete ; and 
are often being utilised as private garages, stores, 
small workshops, etc. Now, however, is the very 
time for city improvers. Garages peculiarly lend 
themselves to concentration, not to dispersion ; and 
private enterprise is already providing facilities for 
this here and there, though as yet on too small a 
scale. 

Moreover, the hygienist has fully demonstrated the 
unwholesomeness of mews ; and the corresponding 
groupings, into definite blocks, of such mews as will 
for some time be required, should thus be insisted on 
by the municipal authorities ; since large collective 
stables are far more easily, and cheaply, kept in 
healthy order than are a multitude of small scattered 
ones. 

Some of the existing mews will no doubt afford 
places for the grouping of workshops, studios, etc., 
as already more or less in progress ; but large demo- 
litions of them would also be possible, with not in- 
considerable gain to the needed open spaces. 

Again, the throwing together of innumerable yards 



WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 107 

and drying greens, which at present disgrace the 
backs of even our best city-quarters, should be more 
and more comprehensively dealt with ; and garden 
quadrangles should thus increasingly replace the 
present squalid labyrinth of wasted greens, cut up by 
innumerable walls. A single central drying-house for 
each garden-court might at the same time be provided, 
the whole thus setting free for vital uses over the 
city an aggregate of many acres, and these far more 
accessible, and therefore more useful, than are the 
parks, for the daily use of childhood and family life, 
and for happy garden-activities, both for youngsters 
and their elders. 

Such minor (yet in aggregate considerable) changes 
need but beginnings ; and not a few of these begin- 
nings are in actual progress. Such modest initiatives, 
moreover, gently break down prejudices, and prepare 
the way for that large measure of municipal reorgani- 
sation which the public of our cities will soon desire. 
When this desire has been developed, there is no fear 
but that people will be willing to pay that is, work 
for its satisfaction. The present is the day of small 
things : our fellow-citizens have first to be persuaded : 
hence this repeated emphasis on the need of private 
initiatives. But by all means let each possible step 
be taken within the municipality, and in its various 
departmental offices as well as without ; and let 
public powers be obtained as far as possible, and 
as fast as they can, utilising precedents wherever 
these exist. Edinburgh, for instance, has taken more 



108 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

powers for the suppression of sky-signs, of winking 
abominations, and regulation of advertisements gener- 
ally, than have as yet most other cities ; while 
Glasgow has, of course, long been an example in 
larger matters. 

As I close this chapter I see from the morning's 
paper how the archons of a sea-coast city, having in 
past years built a gymnasium to Apollo, and likewise 
a temple to Hygeia, whereby their youth are blest, 
have now also offered a modest sacrifice to Poseidon. 
This the good sea-god, ever so propitious to the cities 
of this his long-favoured isle, has straightway re- 
warded with the miracle of an unfailing spring of 
sea-water upon their acropolis, albeit well-nigh an 
hour's journey from his waves, and so copious 
that they and theirs may bathe therein for ever. 

Our Edinburgh acropolis is scarce further from the 
sea : the very outflow of such healing waters would, 
moreover, purify innumerable miles of our lofty and 
well-sloped city ; and Poseidon's priest- engineers might 
thus have even greater success among us. Meantime, 
let us hope, they are upon missions round the other 
small cities of our coasts : the rich and great are often 
the hardest to awaken. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 

The Biological view of Economics "There is no Wealth but Life. 
Contemporary transition from "money wages," through "minimum 
wage," to " family budget," and thence to Vital Budget. 

The degradation of the Labourer ; in Shakespeare, and in subse- 
quent writers. Need of a new " Hodgiad," and this in terms of Folk, 
Work, and Place ; such an interpretation of this historic depression 
is largely in terms of the deterioration of housing. Essential achieve- 
ment of "Industrial (i.e. Paleotechnic) Age" here defined as slum. 
Slums commonly so called, their origin and their varieties. Applica- 
tion of Veblen's " Theory of Business Enterprise." Slums too much 
everywhere : middle-class in Semi-slums. Even wealthy quarters 
are too much but Super-slums. Illustrations from modern cities at 
their best, e.g. Mayfair for London, New Town for Edinburgh. 
Cinderella and the looting of her kitchen : its depression into area. 
Her approaching deliverance : science the fairy godmother, electricity 
her wand : Modern Magic and Romance. 

The people are still too indifferent to housing : illustrations from 
Edinburgh and other Scottish cities, with their tenement problem. 
i Hopeful example of constructive initiative headed by Henry Vivian. 
\ Concluding appeal to Women. 

PHYSICS is thus not the only science which criticises 
the traditional paleotechnic economy into its essential 
resultants of dissipated energies, of dust and ashes, 
however veiled in glittering gossamers of money 
statistics. Biology too has its word to say : and 
just as for the physicist there is no wealth save in 
realised and conserved energies and materials, so for 

109 



110 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the evolutionary biologist, exactly as for Ruskin 
before him, " there is no Wealth but Life." Is it 
replied, " We have all to live as best we can " ? 
That is a characteristic phrase of pseudo-economics, 
which misleads capital and labour alike into its accept- 
ance, its repetition everywhere. But taking it bio- 
logically, as normal evolutionists, resolute not to be 
deteriorisers, our problem is to live at the best we can, 
as well as we can, through our twenty-four hours a 
day in the first place, and for as many days as we 
can in the second. Our full normal expectation of 
life should be in advance therefore of that of the 
past simple industries not falling short of it, as ill- 
housed and underfed (when not overfed) paleotechnic 
communities have done, and are still doing. Towards 
thus living out our days, certain conditions are 
fundamental; and first, a certain life -maintaining 
minimum of real wages, experimentally determined 
by physiologists. Their experimental results have 
lately been coming into application in everyday life 
in this country, as notably to the working folk of 
York, by its eminent neotect, and corresponding neo- 
economist, Mr Seebohm Rowntree. 1 His achieve- 
ment has been to get definitely below the money 
terms of paleotechnic wages, and to define clearly 
for the first time, as "primary poverty," that line of 
real poverty, physiological poverty, below which 
organic efficiency cannot be maintained. 

This stage of biological economics once reached, 

1 Poverty, by F. Seebohm Rowntree. Nelson, Is. 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 111 

this concrete way acquired of looking below " wages " 
to budget, below " wealth " to weal, there is of course 
no harm, but immediate convenience and advantage, 
in comparing the physiologist's minimum ration the 
proteids, fats, and amyloids, which the labourer and 
his family require, and its real and permanent 
statistical notation of heat and work units, " calories " 
with the fluctuating money notation of the trader 
and his economist. For this notation will now also 
serve us, instead of mastering them ; it can no longer 
go on blinding us all to the physical and physiological 
facts behind it. We are getting, in fact, towards our 
" minimum wage " : yet the moment this fascinating 
and handy cash sum begins again to be thought of 
as being " for practical purposes " the goal of the 
workman, instead of as a mere book-keeping notation 
recording the details of how he may have got the 
said rations, then of course prices will begin to be 
worked up again by the commercial interest; and 
this until he is in deeper primary poverty than ever. 

Yet even Mr Rowntree has but only begun to 
touch the question of housing ; vital and fundamental 
to the family budget, as he and all other constructive 
workers recognise it to be. AVhat is the very core 
of economic history if not the story of the home ? 

The story is a long one of the degradation of the 
rustic and the urban labourer, and of their houses, 
from the best days of real wages, in the later middle 
age to their lowest levels in the early part of the 
nineteenth century. And though Thorold Rogers 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and others have done much for the description of its 
various stages, now of decline and now of catastrophe, 
the nature and amount of this whole process its 
meanings, its present-day results are still far from 
realised ; indeed cannot fully be by those of us who 
have escaped from the process. In the world of 
labour these have been sunk, not simply below historic 
consciousness, as in the prosperous classes, but even 
below tradition, into a dull acceptance of lowered 
standards of life submitted to as yet in the concrete, 
even by most of those who vigorously protest and 
agitate in the abstract. Here Shakespeare, amid the 
farce and drollery, the fairy beauty which he weaves 
around princely dignities and patrician loves in A 
Midsummer Night's Dream, is all the truer witness, 
in that he did not more strongly protest against that 
fulness of degradation he so clearly sees, so fitly 
names that of the English yeoman fallen to bottom, 
that of the craftsman sunk to starveling, and of faces 
stunted before birth to the characteristic snout that 
ugliest of reversions to the low nose and protruding 
jaws of brute-like ancestry, by which Mr Punch, 
albeit so kindly a jester among all classes of his own 
island-folk, has seldom wearied of recalling to the 
Irishman as if the Celtic memory were not already 
long and bitter enough the Great Famine, and how 
our statesmen and their economists bade his mother 
starve through it ere he was born. 

Such grim gleanings are but straws upon the long 
torrent of disasters, which is well-nigh the main 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 

history of the people ; and which even their few and 
sad annalists have, from time to time, recorded but 
scantily, and which historians are only now beginning 
to summarise and estimate, towards that woeful 
" Hodgiad " which a writer endowed with a true 
spark of the epic spirit has lately promised us. 
Happily, such writers are not mere clerks of the 
recording angel, still less avengers for these are ever 
but useless, and worse. The task, though like the 
diagnosis of a long-standing and intensifying disease, 
complex, repellent in its details, is a necessary, a 
purposive, a hopeful one curative it may be even to 
some of its present sufferers, preventive certainly to 
their successors, and in increasing measure. This 
long depression of the people has been treated from 
many points of view. Once slavery, next serfdom, 
now wagedom has been blamed for all things : ex- 
planations, religious and political, commercial and 
legal, have each in turn been pushed to the uttermost, 
and so on ; while correspondingly simple panaceas 
have been again and again offered, and even applied, 
yet always with disappointing incompleteness of 
success we at last begin to see why. It is now 
coming to the turn of the student of housing and of 
hygiene to add his contribution, and to review the 
whole sad history of labour to its concrete resultants, 
in place, and work, and folk ; in folk, and work, and 
place. The rotting cabins of Old Ireland, the tumble- 
down cottages of the English labourer, the squalid 

and super-crowded tenement of the Scot (a prison- 

8 



114 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

tower too massive, alas ! to tumble down), are thus 
so many regional culminants, each of a long and 
doleful record of social and individual mishaps and 
disasters, violences and diseases, mistakes and follies, 
vices and crimes ; and each and all with their intricate 
nemesis, provoking any and all others in its unceasing 
turn. Here, then, in and around Old Dublin, Old 
Edinburgh, Old London, and in all the minor towns 
and cities these respectively epitomise and influence, 
we begin to realise the complex conditions on which 
the Machine Age went to work, and which it has now 
largely intermingled and combined into its central 
and characteristic resultants of "production," by 
and for the mass of the people. What after all are 
these ? Such and such bales and shiploads ; imports 
and exports, the economist is wont to reply ; so many 
pounds, shillings, and pence. But in civics we look 
at things differently, and what we mainly see are the 
modern " poor quarter " and the " industrial quarters," 
which thus make up three-fourths and more of our 
industrial towns. 

There is no real lack of sympathy or good- will in 
the world. Individual cases, local miseries, arouse it 
easily : hence the half-crowns and tracts, the soup- 
kitchens and mission-halls with which philanthropy so 
long relieved itself by sprinkling the abyss ; hence even 
the dispensaries, gardens, and other sounder begin- 
nings towards its reorganisation ; for this is at length 
becoming seen as necessarily thorough, if no longer 
to be as good as none. Yet nothing in this volume 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 



115 




116 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

perhaps no generalisation in contemporary science 
seems so difficult to most ordinarily well-to-do, 
kindly, sensible people, such as may read it, as to 
realise the general view here seriously taken, presented 
and maintained, of the essential achievement of the 
Industrial Age, its predominant material outcomes, 
as essentially and typically summed into and around 
one single, central synoptic vision of its towns and 
cities alike, their " composition portrait," their realised 
ideal. What is this concrete goal and final generalisa- 
tion of paleotechnic industry and its economics alike, 
this synthetic achievement and concept of its main 
doing and thinking ? In a single word, it is Slum. 

Slum : Slum, not merely for a mere submerged 
tenth, for rural colliery village, for resultant black 
country and its towns, but even for our great cities. 
For what but mere Semi-slums are these long 
dormitory rows, to which our most prosperous skilled 
workmen, our foremen and guards, even our clerks 
get home at night, and between whose mean, wee 
back-yards, or yet drearier and emptier school-yards, 
their bairns have to grow up, and within whose narrow 
limits their w r omen-folk drudge out all their days. 

Business, however, that surely is better off? since 
it is of the very essence of the paleotechnic order that 
the commercial process should outdo the mechanical 
one. Think how fine it sounds to be " something in 
the City." Yet to the descriptive naturalist-observer 
of cities, rendered immune to gold-mania, as all 
should be, and, as education revives, shall be through 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 117 

mineralogy from childhood its boasted hypnotic 
magic fails, indeed but evokes contemptuous memories 
of i he tales of the dragon's glittering hoard and dingy 
lair, of " the emperor's new clothes," and so on. For 
" the City " is no longer the true City it once was, 
and may be again. This focus, yesterday and to-day, 
of the paleotechnic financial struggle and success 
what is it mainly after all, but the exaggeration of 
its old Ghetto by later imported ones ? with, beside 
this, the hypertrophy, in unmatched disorganisation, 
of its historic seaport ? and beyond these, the decad- 
ence of its skilled industries and manufactures ? 
Ghetto-slums, Port-slums, Works-slums, Shop-slums, 
Barrow-slums, Pub-slums, Trull-slums, Thief-slums, 
Doss-slums all the way out and back again to the 
Embankment. Is this ugly catalogue after all far 
out as a rough charcoal sketch, and even map-mark- 
ing, for a first sociological survey-excursion to con- 
temporary London Town ? Do not these all chink 
only too true to the City's simple tune and dance, 
" The Jingling Purse." And for how many other of 
the whilom cities of our contemporary civilisation 
will not a too similar, if smaller, outline serve ? The 
most penetrating, and hence till lately least read, of 
American economists, though in his new and seeming- 
abstruse way the first of American humorists also, 
Prof. Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure 
Class is at length becoming a classic, has also more 
lately given us a Theory of Industrial Enterprise. 
In this there are for the first time keenly analysed 



118 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

out and contrasted the diverse tendencies of the 
machine process, and of the commercial process, 
which traditional economists have hitherto treated as 
in the main a harmonious whole, but of which he 
brings out the mutual disorganisation they at present 
involve. His idea once mastered, the student of cities 
will find that it applies to the places he knows in 
detail ; and, to begin with, that it throws no little 
light upon the contrasted commercial wealth of the 
City and the comparative industrial poverty of East 
London. Similarly in New York, upon the strange 
juxtaposition of Wall Street and the Bowery. Yet 
through all Veblen's apparent pessimism (as through 
the descriptions and arguments of this volume, we 
trust, also) there runs an unbroken clue that of 
observed and reasoned science not without threads 
of life, and faith in it, woven through its tough cord. 
With direct physicist-like argument, he works out 
the inevitable, however difficult and gradual, victory 
of the machine process over the commercial process : 
for the linking up of the chain of physical efficiencies 
all the way from Nature to life must needs overpower 
and eliminate all present or possible parasitisms in 
transit. Thus in his own way he practically expresses 
and explains that birth of the neotechnic age from the 
paleotechnic, which is a central thesis of the present 
volume. 

Return, however, to the proposition above laid 
down, ugly and harsh as it may seem that of the 
essential and characteristic product of the present 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 119 

predominance of the lower industrial, or paleotechnic, 
age being fairly and broadly generalisable as Slum ; 
the view that to this most undivine event our main 
economic creation has moved. Now, if this seem 
exaggerated, unjust even, where in the modern world 
can this be so much so as amid the solid wealth and 
luxury of Mayfair, or the spacious dignity, the 
impeccable decorum of New Edinburgh? Each of 
these surely is free from slum? Or if, on the 
shortest walk, or on Mr Booth's London Map, we 
do find the real and unquestionable article a good 
deal nearer and newer than we expected, the essential 
and characteristic patrician streets are surely free? 
The great squares, at any rate who can think of 
slums here ? 

With the briefest visit to Dublin, however, such 
an optimistic estimate is shaken. For here are whole 
streets of mansions, larger than those of Edinburgh, 
more richly wrought within than those of London, 
yet slums already, from end to end. And poor slums 
they make : mostly of one-roomed dwellings all ; their 
very spaciousness, relatively healthy of course where 
the family keeps to itself, is also a temptation to take 
in lodgers. Thus, even in such really grand houses, 
we are sure of no continuing city. But to-day at 
least, say, in Belgrave Square, or Adam's statelier, 
if smaller, Charlotte Square in Edinburgh here 
surely this ugly slum-generalisation does not, cannot 
apply ? At first sight perhaps not ; but to the present 
survey it needs but a second glance to say that even 



120 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

such fine New Towns, if not a species, are at best a 
hybrid of the same slum-formation, no doubt there- 
fore deserving its special name. This, then, we pro- 
pose to call Super-slum. 

Does this harsh epithet need explanation, justifica- 
tion ? Presumably ; then, with the reader's patience, 
these shall be submitted. 

First, in fairness, a word of recognition of the 
architectural qualities, superlative in their way, of 
these great streets and squares of London and Edin- 
burgh, to which town planners and their pupils will 
long come, and rightly, to measure, to learn, and to 
admire. These facades, each with its dozen or score 
of great houses combined into a single palace-front as 
long as a cathedral, are all in their way a supreme 
achievement of the eighteenth-century renascence ; 
and their master-architect, Robert Adam, may fairly 
rank among its three mightiest men, with no superior 
in his own craft, and none in his age in general grasp 
of the classic past, save Gibbon, its historian, and 
Piranesi, its etcher. Adam, too, represents the con- 
vergence and climax of all the available great lines 
of architectural tradition ; and first of all, that of 
the best renascence work of England, for the previous 
century. He knew and rivalled with the best that 
had been done in France; and he gave his w r ork a 
stamp and quality of his own, not only by his 
intimate and thorough studies of Roman antiquities, 
along with his friend Piranesi but by his inde- 
pendent reinvestigation of that great palace of 



122 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Diocletian, which has survived so largely through its 
transformation into the old town of Spalatro. 

We must admire the spacious well-proportioned 
garden-squares upon which such mansions often look ; 
and here again realise that no man was ever further 
from being a slum-builder, in intention at least. Yet 
circumstances, and the spirit of the age, were too 
strong even for him. Pass through any of these 
mansions to its other side. In Roman times we 
should have found a stately pillared courtyard at 
least ; in medieval times a great cloister-square, an 
ambulatory, gardens of herbs and simples. At the 
Renaissance proper its architect would have created 
a veritable palace courtyard, or a garden like that of 
an Oxford College. But here, even Adam has been 
allowed to give us nothing but a bare rough-built 
tenement wall, such as we can see anywhere in Edin- 
burgh slums, and an outlook upon a labyrinth of 
dreary drying-greens, cut up by mean walls into a 
web of proportionless quadrilaterals, triangles, and 
clumsy trapeziums. In this w r ay whole acres lie 
derelict, spoilt for every vital purpose ; yet all with 
that wild and unparalleled prodigality, where lower 
uses are concerned, which ever characterises the 
professed utilitarian all devoted to individualistic 
washing-days, and seldom any longer used even for 
that. Gardening has sometimes been attempted, but 
with little result. At best there is a forlorn tree or 
two, self-sown, or planted anyhow. So far this 
spoiled garden-space is airy enough, for the upper 







& 



C 

s 



'2 
I 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

storeys at least : but, in a majority of cases, each 
mansion is further cursed with its share of mews, as 
token of its gentility ; and thus, until sanitation but 
of the other day, there have been provided breeding- 
grounds for flies, and indirectly for the diseases they 
carry ; thus again levelling up with slumdom proper. 

Super-slum is far too complimentary for all this. 
What is it but slum, impure and simple? Indeed 
worse ; for deadly dull, its gardens childless. Some day 
of course, when its residents have become disenchanted 
from their isolated gentility, from their obsession of 
private property in these pitiable back-yard cat-walks, 
and are again becoming citizens, these paltry little 
greens will be cheaply and simply thrown together 
into one worthy garden, with walks for the elders, 
flower-borders, grass spaces and play-courts for the 
children, and with one central or lateral building, if 
need be, for a washing-house and drying-room 
together ; with the tenement-backs orielled, balconied, 
ivied, embowered ; with mews and garages concen- 
trated at a few strategic centres. 

What, then, is all such improvement upon the 
mess Robert Adam was compelled to make, but a 
detail of that improvement of slums, which is as yet 
only thought of and practised for the very poorest of 
them, and that too partially, but which cannot fairly 
be denied to these of the poor rich. Citizenship, like 
justice, like hygiene (which are indeed, but details of 
it), must now carry its missions, and begin its settle- 
ments in the West End no less than in the East. 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 125 

When the proud sisters set about making Cinder- 
ella into a slavey they bade her stay by the fire, while 
they went off to their end of the fine old room, which 
had been kitchen and hall in one, and partitioned it 
off, as henceforth their " dining-room," and then their 
withdra wing-room beyond that. But how to furnish 
these two new apartments ? The only thing they 
saw to do was to carry off all that was worth lifting 
from the old home-centre, and about the old fireside. 
Hence the massive oaken table in our dining-room, 
and the big dresser that we now call the sideboard ; 
the old carved plate-rack too, now the overmantel, 
witli the maidenly little mirror of its lowest shelf 
enlarged later to megalomaniac dimensions. For 
the withdrawing-room, and its evening occupations, 
they took away the old ancestral carved and painted 
dower-chest, fallen to rag-box whence our Victorian 
" chiffonier." With this went the big chairs of the 
old parents, the well- wrought smaller ones for family 
use and for guests, even the carven stools. The 
beaten trays and the polished vessels were of course 
requisitioned ; even the odd and handy things on the 
mantel-shelf, henceforth to be useless ornaments ; 
above all, the harp which had made all hearts and 
classes one. They left Cinderella nothing save her 
pots and pans, her broom : but next, since for the 
daily purposes of their own service, and comfort, 
table and dresser, plate-rack and mantel-shelf, with a 
chair or two were found to be indispensable, the 
looted originals were not restored, but were replaced 



126 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

by the meanest and cheapest deal-boardings that 
Peter Quince the joiner, in the concurrent depression 
of himself and his craft, could be induced to supply. 
Among these Cinderella has since toiled on as best 
she may centuries of her in the past, millions of her 
to-day. 

By-and-by the proud sisters "need" the whole 
floor-space of the house for their dinners and their 
balls; indeed by-and-by, as this area becomes con- 
tracted in town, the withdrawing-room must be put 
upstairs, above the dining-room. New surroundings 
next must be found for Cinderella, with her necessary 
work and its poor belongings. For such dirty work, 
such ugly things, not to speak of such an inferior 
creature, any place obviously is good enough, but 
where shall we find even that ? The sisters call in 
the mason, who has lost his medieval guild-comrade- 
ship and mastery, with its building of church, and 
hall, and cottage; and so is ready to pass entirely 
into the service of the grand and wealthy folk, as 
henceforth their " architect." He has an inspiration, 
which at once commends itself. He points out a 
space into which we can now put all these vulgar 
things underground. True, in simpler previous ages 
it was thought only fit for cellarage, or for dungeon ; 
but now, with that modern touch upon old tradition 
which is most of originality, architectural or other, he 
has invented the area flat henceforth cellar and 
dungeon in one. Thus is evolved the standard 
house-plan of Belgravia, New Edinburgh, of British 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 127 

respectability anywhere, with its increasingly 
separated social castes. 

Though for the long succession of real Cinderellas 
in every street there has as yet come no fairy god- 
mother, love may and does deliver her ; she escapes 
to u home of her own. But her love - prince is 
kingdomless, landless, homeless : the young pair have 
for lodging but squalid choice : that of some room 
or two, at best between the garret and the cellar of 
the tenement the fallen mason brother has meantime 
been constructing, that they may pay high rents to 
the proud sisters still. So when the furnishing 
begins, and the woman's home-building instinct has 
its one opportunity in life to order all things duly, 
she has forgotten indeed she never learns that the 
old beauty, the real art, the true wealth therefore, of 
the proud sisters' furnishings at their best, had ever 
belonged to her old kitchen at all. Meantime, they 
have tired of them also, and bought new Victorian 
upholstery they think ever so much finer, and their 
new Cinderella too. When on some rare Sunday 
afternoon visit, she sees them now in the museum, 
she and hers pass vacantly by, without even noticing 
their antique beauty; or, if they do, without a 
moment's thought that if such things were for her 
likes in earlier, poorer ages, why not again, in these 
richer ones, and that speedily ? 

I [ere, then, in brief and broad summary of economic 
and industrial history, is some account of the general 



128 CITIES IN 7 EVOLUTION 

depression, the mean ugliness of our towns, and of 
the origins of the tasteless art of the rich, and the 
artless taste of the poor. Slum, Semi-slum, Super- 
slum to this has come the Evolution of Cities. This 
is the harmonious environment which lower, middle, 
and upper class, which labourer and capitalist alike, 
have created ; and to which they belong : and here 
are their real wages : within these narrow beats, these 
essentially parallel streets, in which "upper" and 
" lower " class matter so much less than either thinks, 
the minds of the capitalist and his political economist, 
of the labourer and his economist, of all their woman- 
folk, are alike half-blanched, half-blackened grey 
lives all. Within these still dominant limits and 
grooves of the paleotechnic thought and life, what 
prospect is there of adequate escape ? Money-strikes 
here, lock-outs there, offer but a poor economic 
prospect ; nor are even the rival political outlooks 
behind the scenes, at least so much brighter. We 
can but go on looking for the solution of our social 
enigmas in the study of the world around us, cheer- 
less though that yet may seem. 

We return, then, to our story. But who believes 
any longer in fairy godmother, or fairy prince ? Do 
not all our neighbours, whichever their variety of 
slum, their faith economic or political, alike pronounce 
upon themselves the magic-expelling, romance-killing 
word " practical"- than which nothing is so self- 
satisfying, so positively (and literally) "enchanting." 
So, meantime, Cinderella goes on in the cellar-kitchen 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 129 

in her own when married, just as she did in others' 
when single ; for the more she changes, the more 
things practically abide the same. Yet little though 
either she or the sisters see or believe it, " practically " 
enchanted as they still are, blind to the sciences and 
their applications, the fairy godmother is coming, 
nay, is even here : year by year now she stands 
waving her fairy electric wand as the herald of the 
new era, in the domestic labour and consequent life 
of woman, ready and waiting to free her from all the 
old elements of dirt and drudgery, and this hence- 
forth for good and all. Her future in the adequate 
neotechnic home, characterised by electricity and its 
labour-saving, by hygiene, and by art, is thus as true 
princess, that is, lady commanding assured wealth, 
effective service, adequate leisure, and thus with no 
limit to her refinement and her influence. As soon 
as we please, then, we may begin to emancipate 
Cinderella, no longer depress her through slavey 
into charwoman and crone. 

Of course princesses will have their problems still ; 
but these do not belong to the present story. Let 
us rather restate her immediate problem in another 
way. Let us recall to her, and her men folk too, 
the story of the prisoner who languished year after 
year in his gloomy prison ; until one day he opened 
the door and came out ! The padlock had rusted off; 
passers-by had often told him so ; but he could not 
bring himself to believe them. So it is with the 
public of our towns, rich and poor alike : the speedy 



130 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and thorough passage from all this smoke and squalor 
and torment, and with vast economy of national and 
of individual resources, is now fully within our reach. 
But we are too much depressed by this environment 
to mend it. Whether obvious slum-dwellers or 
money-millionaires, we are thus slum-children all, 
our would-be " practical statesmen " still unpractical, 
our " economists " not yet economic. Indeed, as 
every summer's holiday shows, and as every nerve 
physician knows, we are all rendered more or less 
neurasthenic by our present too paleotechnic environ- 
ments. 

Does our fairy tale to any still seem vain ? There 
is no more condensed truth in the literatures of the 
world than are fairy tales. Wherever Man gains 
power over Nature, there is Magic. Whenever he 
carries out an Ideal into Life, there is Romance. 
When he loses both, there is stony Enchantment, 
in which so many lie. When he recovers both, he 
has vanquished the enchanter ; he has won his Bride, 
and the Kingdom with her. There is not, there 
never was, a briefer summary of the essential life- 
adventure than this, and what other can there be ? 
What better for truly practical purposes ? It is fully 
applicable even to difficult and apparently modern 
cases, like the disenchantment of the poor economist, 
the modern philistine, who was really at bottom not 
at all such a bad fellow as from his works we have 
been making him. He has only got enchanted, by 
thinking he might win Magic without Romance, 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 131 

might use power over Nature, not to abuse it, 
only apart from any corresponding human ideals. 
In fact, what he tried was to deal with wealth 
even to make a " science of wealth " -without 
taking in Civics ! forgetting, that is, the sweethearts 
thai; the real working sons of men work to win, and 
to keep, and who thus together have ever created 
homes and cities, and all wealth worth the name. 
And beyond these princesses of flesh and blood 
appear yet fairer ideals ; hence the goddess and her 
Temple ; hence Acropolis ; hence Cathedral. All 
these the neotechnic city has to recover, to renew ; 
not longer outwardly " restoring," as with the 
romantics and paleotects, but re-creating, as ex- 
pressions of the renewing life within. 

Towards the disenchantment of the politician, who 
will be more and more faithfully dealt with as the 
civic movement advances, a kindred process also 
appears. Indeed he has always had something of 
the fairy prince ; though still in the stage of failing 
to master the clue for this high adventure. 

We may now likewise make our peace with the 
paleotechnic age, as it dies away before a better order ; 
since its life, its achievements, were the inevitable 
preparation for those which replace them. Its dirt 
and disease, its disorder, have been but incidents and 
accessories to its efforts, and are now to be eliminated. 
The dust and dirt, for instance, will not much longer 
be stirred about by the prehistoric individual broom, 
but by a fuller organisation of hygiene, which will at 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

once purify the atmosphere, wash our cities well-nigh 
germ-free, reopen them to the all-purifying sun ; and 
thus abate immeasurably the indoor toil of women, 
itself aided by the better domestic appliances every- 
where coming within reach. 

But the people do not yet care for all this, it may 
be said. No doubt this is in the main too true. 
However, a personal anecdote may be permitted as 
relevant. Looking on with the architect at the com- 
pletion of a new tenement of workmen's dwellings in 
the High Street of Old Edinburgh, a block modest 
enough, of course, yet with some advances in hygiene 
and aspect over what had been before available, a 
workman of the neighbourhood tapped one of us 
on the shoulder : " Pity you haven't a hundred 
working-men that understand what you're about 
there ! " " You mean building their own homes ? " 
" Ay, that's it ! By Jove ! wouldn't they go down 
the street ! " " You mean their working efficiency 
would be increased ? " " Rather ! " 

This happened more than twenty years ago ; and 
there are still few signs of the hundred Edinburgh 
working-men. Their marked individuality in their 
leaders indeed an outstanding intellectuality their 
mastery of (and by) abstract politics has long raised 
them far above sharing the petty local interests of us 
city improvers or town planners, who occupy our 
minds and hands with concrete trifles like homes and 
gardens, and pleasanter streets all very well, no 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 



133 



doubt, but which only your slow concrete-minded 
German really cares for. Houses and gardens, streets 
and squares ? No, no. Whole city wards even are 
too small. " Constituencies " are the very smallest 




FIG. 29. An improved tenement house (1892) in Lawnmarket 
(Upper High Street), Edinburgh. 

units really worth recognising, and these only at 
election times, when they heckle their rival candidates 
to tatters more sharply than Government or Opposi- 
tion will afterwards do. Measures of national, im- 
perial magnitude are not less shrewdly discussed ; for 
among such groups of workmen one used to hear- 
doubtless may still hear talk as good and clear, as 



134 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

shrewd and trenchant, as one gets in club or commit- 
tee, in college or debate, in learned society or salon. 
In all cities probably the skilled artisan's opinion is 
far less behind that of " the intellectuals " than these 
suppose ; and, in Edinburgh at least, it is too often 
the intellectuals who fall behind. Yet after all this 
high and serious converse, our Scots workmen retire 
to their homes no, their houses no, not houses. 
There is no word which can convey to ordinary old- 
fashioned English readers who still cling to the 
national idea on which they were brought up, of 
homes as separate houses, of each family with its own 
bit of ground, at least its yard, however small the 
full content and savour which our Scottish cities- 
Historic Edinburgh, Great Glasgow, Bonnie Dundee, 
and minor ones, with burghs without number manage 
to condense and to express in their, in one sense, high 
tradition of " Working-class Tenements." Inspiring 
name ! These are inhabited by the majority of the 
Scottish people : more than half the whole population 
in fact, are in one- and two-room tenements a state 
of things unparalleled in Europe or America, in fact, 
in the history of civilisation. To realise these Scottish 
conditions with any measure of town-planning con- 
creteness the English reader must build up for himself 
a model, if indoors, with small packing-cases up to the 
ceiling ; or, if he be rustic enough still to possess an 
adequate backyard, small one- and two-chambered 
coops and hutches would be the thing, if he could 
get but enough piled storey above storey, four, 



136 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

five, and six, to keep within modern regulations 
around a single lofty spiral ladder. Old tenements, 
of course, are far higher ; indeed the sky-scraper 




FIG. 31. Old tenements : Cowgate, Edinburgh. 

became as characteristic of Old Edinburgh, especi- 
ally after the Revolution of 1688, as they have 
now become of New York and with analogous 
effect on land-values, and consequent difficulty of 



THE ffOMES OF THE PEOPLE 137 

escaping from them, and from their multiplication 
elsewhere. 

Yet this Scotland is the nation which, up to the 
beginning of the Industrial Age, was, save Norway, the 
most rustic and the most stalwart in Europe. It is 
now the most urban ; and how far deteriorated it is 
happily not here our present duty to inquire. 

Into the complex question of historic and con- 
temporary conditions which have thus brought it 
about that the most educated, and politically the 
most " advanced," of British workmen are the worst 
housed in Britain, or anywhere else we cannot here 
enter. We can merely refer to our " Civic Survey 
of Edinburgh," and kindred studies, assume the facts, 
and add to them one more : that when, as of course 
now and then of late years, some little Housing 
discussion is raised in Scotland, the tenements, and 
even their one- and two-roomed components, still find 
no lack of advocates, and these among all classes ! 
Not only do individuals speak in their defence, but 
even local pride is aroused. The fact is, we rather 
look down upon small brick houses : we admire our 
lofty piles of stone : we still use their historic and 
legal name of " Lands." Finally, the whole matter is 
put upon what are really high metaphysical grounds 
(which " the practical man " is ever so liable to wander 
into). We are made to feel a certain fitness in 
these things, a certain established harmony; in fact 
a sort of foreordination of Scotsmen for tenements, 
and of tenements for Scotsmen. Upon these tower- 



138 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

ing heights of national destiny, therefore, the economic 
verdict is easy to give, and hard to refuse that "we 
can afford nothing better." Economic explanations 
are added by some, and political explanations of these 
by others : none of them sufficient. But without this 
abstract and philosophical turn, in fact this at bottom 
theological dignity of argument, the proposition that 
the printers and masons of Edinburgh, the ship- 
builders and engineers of Glasgow, all admittedly 
second to none in their production, are to be in their 
economic consumption second to all, and that perma- 
nently would be realised in all its flagrant absurdity. 
To find workmen who can really build their own 
homes, and go down the street in proper neotechnic 
style, we must thus for the present leave the Scot to 
discuss the philosophical, the political, the economic, 
and other reasons of his national failure as regards 
adequate housing ; and come to the plainer English 
workman for a lesson in practice. For Garden 
Villages and Suburbs are by no means all made by 
great capitalists like Cadbury and Lever. A bigger 
record than any of these true captains of industry, or 
even of all put together, has already been made by 
working-men. In 1901 a group of joiners in Wales 
put together among them a little capital of 50 (and 
it is to be hoped that most other fifteen joiners else- 
where might also do so without too much difficulty). 
With this to start with they borrowed something 
more ; they set to work, and built a cottage ; by-and- 
by another, and another, and all on co-operative 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 139 

principles, carried a degree further than older Co- 
operators had yet done. And so their business has 
grown; and with its tenth year (1911) the various 
groups of the " Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd.," had 
well nigh completed their second million pounds' worth 
of bettered houses. The leader of this initiative, the 
sower of this mustard seed, Mr Henry Vivian, now 
M.P., may therefore be pointed to as presenting, and 
not personally alone, the proof that such democratic 
and co-operative captaincy of industry may before 
long fairly compare with the more individualistic 
captaincy of the past, or even excel it measured by 
its own financial standards of rapid yet steady increase 
of production, with reasonable direct dividend ; plus 
an intensified indirect return of diffused well-being, 
instead of the opposite. This movement is evoking 
no little of the truly economic, because civic spirit, 
the constructive and the administrative capacity which 
paleotechnic conditions have but depressed and dis- 
couraged, but not effaced. It shows, too, how even 
individual " success in life " may be reached along with 
more general success in living. It expresses the 
transition from paleotechnic towards neotechnic 
conditions ; for its housing is growing up steadily into 
town planning, and this upon a higher standard, not 
only of space and comfort, but of refinement and 
beauty also, year by year. 

Is there, then, nothing like this in Scotland ? Out- 
side Glasgow one sees Singer's great new Machine 
Works surrounded by new tenements, yet almost 



140 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

among the fields. Just outside Edinburgh a whole 
new village has arisen of late years around a group of 
great breweries freshly taken to the country but of 
tenements again. How can we hope to bring in 
better housing among a people whose high and 
abstract cultivation thus lifts them above common 
ground wherever they may go ? We must fall back 




FIG. 32. New tenement village : Duddingston, near Edinburgh. 

upon importing missionaries! Happily, these some- 
times desirable aliens have lately been forthcoming. 
Like honey from the carcase of the lion, a peaceful 
advance of industry and well-being may be gained 
from the very heart of war. Thus the transference 
of some hundreds of torpedo workmen from Woolwich 
to the Clyde lately brought with it the needful dis- 
content with tenement conditions, with disgust, 
refusal even ; and a garden village for these soundest, 
wisest, and most successful of strike-leaders let us 
hope some day strike- exemplars is therefore already 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 141 

in progress. In this way, with ocular demonstration 
that a horizontal distribution of homes is possible, 
even beside vertically arranged ones, and that four 
rooms with a garden can be inhabited with greater 
advantages than two rooms with none, some descent 
towards material desires of the political intellect of 
Glasgow, and of its material belongings from their 
present high eminence, need not wholly be despaired 
of; while, should anything like this be permitted at 
Rosyth, even the lofty Edinburgh mind might be- 
come unsettled. 

Have we still touched too little on the human 
drama ? So far inevitably our problem has been that 
of preparing to clear off the paleotechnic debris of 
the play now approaching its conclusion, and of 
offering suggestions towards the opening one. 

The past too individualistic drama, that of the 
pak otects, as we all now agree, is ending so largely 
in social failure that it is high time to be staging the 
civic drama, renewing its long-forgotten ideals. For 
as we escape from the myths of a homeless individual- 
ism we see that the city in one age with acropolis 
and forum, in another with town house and cathedral 
has ever been the theatre and stage indispensable 
for expressing, with any real fulness and adequacy, 
each individual life. The contrast between the 
money wages of the passing present and the vital 
budget of the opening future is one which must go 
more and more literally home and into every life 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

woman's life above all. The tale of Cinderella is 
thus no mere fairy tale, but literal pantomime in the 
exact meaning of the word, the actual movements of 
people and things, shown forth silently, but none the 
less surely. 

Historically treated, architecture has seemed too 
long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells 
and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary 
science it begins anew with the living and growing 
city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth 
overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable 
valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had 
too little touch with the actual living polyps, yet 
their presence, their essential activity, their vital 
needs, have been generalised indeed, but not forgotten. 
The homely hearth in one age, Cinderella's kitchen 
in another, the reorganised home in a third, this 
sequence has surely in it some of the needful con- 
creteness. The old-world rustic order with its work- 
ing yet prosperous housewives, the comparatively 
recent and modern contrast of social ranks, with 
drudgery and futility at its extremes, are broadly 
recognised as historical strata of the reef; while 
beyond this we point out, and press, and predict, 
and plead for the incipient domestic order electric, 
hygienic, eugenic ! The drudging charwoman, the 
futile fine lady alike disappear ; and woman, at once 
elemental and evolved, vigorous yet refined, will 
reappear within her home, and be at once effective 
in the kitchen and inspiring in the hall. 



THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 143 

But such homes, still less whole towns of them, 
cannot be made offhand by town planners. There 
must be the effective demand, the revolution in 
thought from the paleotechnic to neotechnic, from 
the money gains of man to the vital budget of 
woman. This has always been instinctively the 
desire of woman ; and it more fully than ever admits 
of being realised, given her co-operation with the 
fairy godmother of science, her entrance to and 
appreciation of her social powers and duties within 
her kingdom. Thus in ultimate issue, to solve the 
problems and accomplish the tasks of citizenship, 
we now need above all the arousal of woman. In- 
dividuals are already appearing : Jane Addams, Lady 
Aberdeen, Mrs Barnett, Mabel Atkinson, may be 
named, and more ; yet these are but heralds and 
pioneers ; and their voices are still far from reaching 
their innumerable sisters. Yet as women have not 
only responded to each uplift of religion, each advance 
of culture, but deeply inspired it also, so it will be 
again ; and their recent and rapid arousal to political 
interests and discussions is but an earnest of their 
coming citizenship. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 

What is the nature and character of the mass of our housing in great 
towns? Their nucleus, the historic town, deteriorated with Industrial 
Age ; hence intense housing evils and their results, with palliatives 
of various kinds and values. 

Steps of advance of the housing movement, as from Octavia Hill to 
Ebenezer Howard, and to incipient recovery of town planning. 

HERE is a subject on which many volumes have been 
written, and many more must be. Of separate papers, 
of local inquiries and general reports, of legislative 
and administrative literature there is no end : while 
of projects and plans, of propagandist articles and 
prospectuses, though these are already many, we are 
still only at the beginning. Within the narrow 
limits of a single chapter, we must evidently keep 
to main lines, and seek for guiding ideas. Summaris- 
ing, then, from the very first, let us ask What is 
this mass of our present housing ? What have been 
its origins ? What are its qualities and defects, its 
present value ? What are the present needs ? And 
what lines of policy are opening towards meeting 
these ? 

To understand this mingled evolution-process, let 
us inquire into its main stages of development. 



144 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 145 

These must be stated successively, though they have 
everywhere more or less overlapped; and though 
they are largely still in progress in many cities. 

1. The nucleus of our present industrial towns 
whether expanding with the opening of the Industrial 
Age towards the close of the eighteenth century, or 
in vaster growth with that of the railway system 
from the early middle of the nineteenth consisted of 
houses of a fairly long succession of preceding 
generations, of varied sizes and standards of comfort 
corresponding to their wealth and status, with many 
varieties of construction, and still more range as 
regards states of repair. Sanitation methods were of 
rough and ready description ; as of abundant middens, 
freely polluting wells, yet themselves mitigated by 
application to the many surviving town gardens, 
or easily removed to the still not distant fields. 
But with the influx of wealth from industries, and 
from the better farming which in the same age 
becomes prevalent, the prosperous classes rehoused 
themselves in new quarters, often a "new town," 
first of westerly streets, and later of suburban villas. 
Their former houses they more or less divided up, to 
house the influx and increase of the working- classes, 
skilled and unskilled alike. The great demand for 
small dwellings was thus met, and at rentals which 
seem at first to have been substantially below the 
cost of new accommodation. Thus capital was dis- 
couraged from building, especially in view of the far 

higher returns promised by industrial investment, or 

10 



146 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 






* - 1 :3$ittt pv** - - * I 



B! 







& 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 147 

later by railway speculation ; for, though the saying 
be exaggerated, it expresses a truth "it was not 
hundreds per cent., but thousands per cent, that made 
the fortunes of Lancashire." Even domestic repairs 
were thus grudged and neglected ; while rising rentals 
seemed but reasonable returns, assured as they were 
by the growth and influx of industrial population. 
Thus squalor, overcrowding, and exaction had all to 
be accepted by the people, whose lamentable con- 
ditions unfortunately found no outlet beyond those 
of political discontent, culminating at length in 
Chartist agitations. Even this discontent was long 
delayed by foreign wars, and next directed against 
the manifest obscurantisms, the obvious omissions and 
commissions of the rural landowner ; and thus safely 
guided past the town landlords and the industrial 
captains, whose more advanced opinions thence- 
forward became efficiently protective. At length, 
however, the high returns from " productive invest- 
ments " began to abate, and the rise of artisan rentals 
became so high as to attract capital into building 
upon a large and growing scale ; but this for a 
standard of housing, accommodation, and comfort 
too little beyond that to which the working popula- 
tion had by this time become inured from child- 
hood, as well as in the main provided by builders 
who had themselves been accustomed to such con- 
ditions as if normal ones. Thus arose, unchecked 
by sanitary knowledge or regulation and largely upon 
the sites furnished by the old gardens and spacious 



148 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

yards which had been of immemorial value, as lungs 
and as playing space that mass of mean cottages, 
back-to-back houses, slum courts, side tenements, 
crevice alleys, and other abominations, which, despite 
subsequent generations of effort, are still too manifest 
throughout the length and breadth of the land, and 
in its cities and towns, too often even its villages. 

2. Palliatives, moreover, were for long (and are 
often still) applied to the manifold consequences or 
accompaniments of these housing evils, rather than 
to these evils themselves, still less to the town as a 
whole, to the hive disordered and swarming. The 
low standards of living, the lapses, loss or perversion 
of these, though for the most part solidary with the 
slum, were supposed, even by the best intentioned 
of all classes and parties, to be capable of amelior- 
ation, and even cure, by any and every method, save 
reconstructive ones. First, of course, an overcrowd- 
ing of prisons ; whence appalling consequences, arous- 
ing the philanthropist to indignation and to efforts still 
far from ended. Both to fill and to thin the prisons a 
ruthless, even ferocious, code of punishment existed, in- 
volving at length its reluctant and gradual mitigation, 
so gradual as only now, with children's courts and first 
offenders' acts, coming even within sight of adequacy. 
Of the great political reforms, extensions of the 
franchise, dramatically and eloquently combated for, 
yet cautiously graded, have bulked most largely ; 
while the mass of accompanying measures, even up 
to date, have also been compatible with less or more 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 149 

of that general blindness to real wages, to family 
environment, efficiency, and well-being, which, in 
this country as in others since the great Revolution, 
has characterised the abstract mind of the politician 
and legislator, and the external view, the mechanical 
routine, of the administrator whom these so abund- 
antly create. Even where improvement of real 
wages has been aimed at, as in the repeal of the 
corn laws ; or subsequently, as by the temperance 
reformer at his too limited best, these defects have 
too much persisted, and of course in member and 
voter alike. 

Even in this necessarily brief and partial retrospect 
of ameliorative endeavours, we would not be un- 
grateful to the long succession of philanthropists 
and reformers, the Howards and Shaftesburys, nor 
to the politicians of various colours who have applied 
themselves to what seemed nearest and most urgent, 
fundamental or supreme. But we may best emphasise 
the present point of view, that of insistence upon the 
condition of houses and these not separately with 
the individualist, nor in vague collectivity with the 
politician, but in definite areas and groupings, of 
courts and streets by naming, as among the very 
best leaders of this palliative movement, the late 
Miss Octavia Hill. Her regular rent-collecting, 
faithful repairing, and moderate dividend - paying, 
and this over large and spreading town areas, repre- 
sented, and still represent, the traditional political 
economy at its best. Had the like of her but begun 



150 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

practice a couple of generations earlier along with 
this economic system and theory, far fewer philanthro- 
pists and reformers would have been needed, fewer 
hospitals and prisons. 

3. In practice, however, the main palliative, and 
this so great and constructive as to open a better 
veritable era, and create a new and ever- accelerating 
uplift, has been the coming in of Municipal Hygiene, 
with its medical officers of health and inspectors, its 
sanitary committees, water trusts, and so on, and 
with corresponding rise of public opinion. Great 
clearances of decayed and insanitary areas have thus 
been made, often indeed too sudden and sweeping. 
For though garnishing may follow and that often 
great and splendid in purpose, it may be even in 
execution, as of public buildings and civic centres 
this period is on the whole characterised by a very 
substantial element of domination of municipalities 
by property owners. These accordingly profit in 
several ways : by generous compensation for clear- 
ances, by rise of adjacent values, by increased com- 
petition for the bulk of dwellings remaining, and 
consequently enhanced rental and capital value of 
these ; not to speak of renewed deterioration, new 
clearance, and compensation to match. To estimate 
to what extent this alternate exploitation of - the 
people and of their municipality has been going on 
during the past half century, and throughout the 
cities of Britain or Europe, as also to what extent 
despite tardy and incompletely effective legislative 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 151 

endeavours to check these manifest evils, they are 
still threatening can but be suggested as a problem 
for statisticians. 

4, Along with the rise of the sanitary movement, 
and as a main fruit of its legislation, hampered as 
this was at every step and clause by limited, sordid, 
or sinister minds, the construction of dwellings was 
standardised into the vast construction of "Bye- 
law Streets." These we have noted already at their 
paleotechnic best as in Durham (pp. 64-5) or in Belfast, 
or again in abundant average in Midlandton and 
Lancaston, York-Ridings or Tyne-Wear-Tees ; while 
below this level, on the whole, stands the Scottish 
tenement, the bulk of Glasgow, of Dundee, of Leith, 
and even of modern Edinburgh. In fact it is here 
worth noting, as a strange example of the ever- 
returning difficulties and disasters which have beset 
the housing movement, that some of the extreme 
examples of tenement crowding per acre have been 
erected upon the lands of the great Edinburgh 
educational trusts in pursuance of their legal responsi- 
bilities, to obtain the maximum return for their 
stewardship ! 

5. From these Scottish examples of standardised 
overcrowding, it is but a step to the model tenements 
till so lately coming into favour in London, and in 
Dublin also. For though the philanthropy which 
has founded the Peabody Buildings, or the yet better 
"Guinness Buildings" of the Irish metropolis, is not 
ungenerously to be questioned, their principle must 



152 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

be condemned ; as that of maximising population per 
acre. It is consequently of a still semi-hygienic 
standard of survival, and even this only for men ; it 
is more unsuitable for women, and most of all for 
children. Happily the extreme cost of construc- 
tion of such high barracks defeats the economy in 
roofs and sites which was at first so alluring ; but the 
widespread arousal of cupidity and of speculation 
through such promising enhancement of land-values 
per acre has done serious damage : and in many 
cities at home, and still more abroad (as notably 
Cologne), it seems to be delaying not a little the 
needful return of land to more healthy and normal 
building uses. 

6. The construction of workmen's dwellings proper, 
upon a better hygienic standard, i.e. of modern 
cottages, in streets of ordinary bye-law type, or even 
of more or less suburban character, with gardens and 
increasing detachment, is thus still too rare ; since it 
involves minimum population, and correspondingly 
lowered land-values, per acre accordingly. Here and 
there private enterprise has shown that it can accom- 
plish something ; while, thanks to the late Alderman 
Thompson, and his colleagues of Richmond (Surrey), 
that municipality has afforded, some years ago, what 
is still one of the best of object-lessons for other 
boroughs. 

7. A type which might have been mentioned 
earlier in this series is that of workmen's dwellings 
built by benevolent and far-sighted employers, since 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 153 

the conspicuous initiatives of Owen at New Lanark, 
of Godin in his Familistere at Guise, and on a larger 
scale that of Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire, 
all date back beyond most living memories. But 
with the Railway Age these promising initiatives 
were forgotten ; and subsequent examples were rare 
until very recent times, when Mr Cadbury's successful 



,-; 




FIG. 34. Workers' cottages, Cox's gelatine works,iEdinburgh (1893). 

village ol Bournville, with its generously designed 
Trust, and Sir William Lever's striking achievement 
at Port Sunlight have become famous, though their 
example is still too rarely followed. A conspicuous 
example, however, is the rose-gardened miners' village 
of A Woodlands, near Chesterfield. There may still be 
hope that new coalfields, such as those opening in 
Yorkshire, in Fife and Lothian, and in Kent, may 
more or less follow suit ; why not even villages of older 
coalfields ? too often, as the Scottish Housing Com- 



154 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

mission has lately brought out, a disgrace to civilisa- 
tion, and practically in but rare cases at all satisfactory. 
A new wave of public feeling, however, is still 
urgently needed ; also a clearer demand for real wages 
among colliers. 

8. The note of social idealism, and in practical yet 
most disinterested form, has been especially struck by 
Mr Ebenezer Howard in his famous Eutopia, as we 




FIG. 35. Cottages, Port Sunlight (Sir Wm. Lever). 

must fairly call it, of Garden Cities. In this notable 
book is set forth the town of the Industrial Age 
now opening that neotechnic order, characterised by 
electricity, hygiene, and art, by efficient and beautiful 
town planning and associated rural development, 
and by a corresponding rise of social co-operation and 
effective good-will, which it is a main thesis of this 
volume to insist upon. Of the Garden City Associa- 
tion which was soon the direct outcome of his labours, 
much need not here be said, the more since its own 
abundant publications are so well known and access- 
ible. We shall return in a later chapter to their 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 



155 



work, after the theme of town planning has been 
more fully entered upon ; but for the steps of progress 
of tliis movement we may, fortunately, at once refer 
to the eminently readable and well-illustrated volume 
of Garden Cities Movement Up-to-date, by Mr Ewart 
Culpin ; whose experience as at once business 




FIG. 36. Girls' recreation ground, Bournville (Messrs Cadbury). 

secretary and propagandist missionary of the Garden 
Cities Association has given him complete resource 
and training for thus leading us to the synoptic 
viev r -point, and showing us the brightening horizon. 
Wil h this too should be consulted the larger and yet 
more recent volume by Mr C. B. Purdom, The 
Garden City, which goes into a vigorous and critical 
treatment not only of Letch worth and its making, 
but of the movement which it has so predominantly 



156 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

initiated, and thence into the ever-widening civic 
and social bearings of all this. 

9. Among further developments of this garden 
city initiative by co-operative methods, may again be 
mentioned the admirable " Co-partnership Tenants " 
system (pp. 138-9) ; and as the most conspicuous and 
successful of existing town-expansions the Hamp- 
stead Garden Suburb. With this great object-lesson, 




FIG. 37. Cottages, New Earswick (Messrs Rowntree). 

so convenient to London, the social possibilities and 
promise of the architect and town planner are becom- 
ing more and more fully seen, as convincing, as matter 
of performance ; and the emergence of Mr Raymond 
Unwin as one of the most constructive of our leaders, 
and the growing national recognition of the practica- 
bility of such Eutopias elsewhere, are thus of no small 
encouragement. We have already strongly protested 
against the advancing danger, conspicuous enough 
near Hampstead itself, as well as further afield, of 
mere would-be copying of this or any other architect's 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 



157 



style ; but such general initiatives cannot be followed 
too widely, if due regionalism and individuality of 
design be assured, as in the best cases it is ; as, for 
instance, at Ruislip. 




How an CUt* U Planned under Ordinary Bye-Uwj 

According tu Ihr Bic-!a*s over torti how Can Ke place,! n. the a 



How the atn* EstaU I* Wanned under Co-parnrKlp Methods by the Harbornv ^ 




FIG. 38. Harborne Village. 

(a) As planned under Bye-laws. 

(b) As executed by Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd. 

10. Such suburban development, however, largely 
awaits a corresponding increase and improvement of 
communications. It might have been pointed out 
earlier that the congestion of our towns is far more 
largely due than we commonly realise to the failure, 



158 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

or rather the repression, of the road-carriages, strangely 
anticipating our modern motor-cycles and motor- 
'buses, with which inventors were busy in the first 
generation of the last century. The man with the 
red flag before the traction-engine, whom we can all 
remember, has thus been the very reverse of a herald 
of progress. The development of suburban railways, 
still more of tramways, now of motor-'buses (and why 
not before long of better appliances still) is thus a 
main condition of suburban development, as Birming- 
ham, Glasgow, and every other large city knows. 
In Glasgow, as the city apparently most successful of 
all in its tramway-system up to date, a discussion is 
arising which may soon interest other cities. One 
party proposes to apply the large and growing 
tramway surplus to create a municipal scheme for 
the housing of the people, while others argue for 
continuing the existing principle of management by 
applying those large sums to the continued extension 
and further cheapening of the system. Without 
unduly taking sides in a matter which, like all such 
questions, should fairly be looked into on the spot, and 
with every desire already emphasised (pp. 140-1) 
to see the backwardness of Glasgow housing brought 
up to tramway efficiency, and helped by it, it may 
yet be gravely questioned whether the first method 
be the best way of achieving this end. For must not 
swifter and cheaper communications loosen out the 
crowded city, and so serve all its interests most 
efficiently in the long run? 



THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 



159 




I 






1 

a- 

"o 



160 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

In this connection, as in that of several preceding 
paragraphs (pp. 151-7), attention may be called to Mr 
Raymond Un win's admirable tract " Nothing Gained 
by Overcrowding," which should be read, marked, and 
digested by landowner and by townsman, by builder 
and workman, by city fathers everywhere, as by 
members of all political and social parties. No 
better example of that lucid commonsense which, 
in each and every advancing science, reforms our 
popular misconceptions, can be given : and it is again 
one of the many disasters of modern cities, that these 
simple plans and their convincing interpretations 
were not worked out a hundred years earlier, and 
that they are even now so little known. 

11. Meantime, indeed, along with half a dozen of 
the phases of better housing above indicated (which 
we may again remind the reader are to be considered 
as much overlapping), there has been going on the 
Recovery of Town Planning. This is no new art to 
us, as eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh, and 
Dublin, and smaller cities without number show ; in 
fact its loss dates only from the Railway Age. Still 
we have had to go to the Continent to recover its 
traditions ; hence our brief survey of housing develop- 
ments may here end, and a chapter or two of foreign 
travel be now undertaken. 



CHAPTER VIII 

TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 

Neec and uses of travel for civics and citizenship. Travellers : in classic 
and in medieval times, e.g. merchant and adventurer, pilgrim and 
friar, student and prentice. Later examples : Erasmus or Adam 
Smith, Ruskin and Browning. 

How to travel : pros and cons of railway. Advantages of classic 
lands, and of Medieval and Renaissance Italy ; eulogy of modern 
France and of Paris, of the United States also, with examples of 
their contemporary civic progress and city design : the town 
planner must, however, above all, acquaint himself with the cities 
of modern Germany. 

IT is no easy matter to change the habits of a people, 
and above all as regards their homes. We have now 
long enough been marching round the walls of the 
paleotechnic Jericho ; we see them beginning to give 
way : it is time now to be fitting ourselves to help 
more fully in that vast reconstruction which must 
follow. For that purpose let us betake ourselves to 
what has always been one of the greatest factors of 
education, both of the individual and of the world, 
and see what is being done in other cities and 
countries. For the uplift of Citizenship, the renewal 
of cities, in which we have each a part, no experience 
of past or present cities can be too great. 

Children as we are of an age which was as much 

161 11 



162 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

astonished and delighted by its new communications 
by railway and steamship, as we can be with our 
motors and flying- machines, we have naturally been 
disposed to think of our forefathers in earlier times 
as relatively confined to narrow limits, and with 
but little experience of travel. Yet travel and 
commerce are prehistoric ; classic history reminds 
us how the roads and communications of the Roman 
Empire ranged with unbroken completeness of paving 
and upkeep throughout the whole Empire, from Tyne 
to Euphrates, and beyond ; not only with legions 
on the march, and postmen at the gallop, but with 
long trains of commerce as well. Through the 
Mediterranean, for so many ages a Roman lake, as 
before that a Carthaginian, a Greek, a Phoenician 
one, the lines of communication have exceeded, in 
number and in variety, the existing web of steamer- 
lines to-day. Even in amount of goods, in quantity 
of passengers, some historians suggest a rivalry, or 
even more; and this is the less improbable when 
we remember, or reconstruct from broken olive- 
terraces and ruined cities, how great in its best days 
was the agricultural development of these now long 
deteriorated lands. But the barbarian broke up 
the roads ; never again to be in good order until 
Macadam's day, even Napoleon's. Surely in medi- 
eval days travel must have been comparatively rare ? 
Yet recall the great overland trade-routes of Europe, 
like those through Nuremberg and Augsburg, on 
which depended not a little the prosperity of the 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 163 

great maritime cities, like Venice and Genoa, like 
Bruges and Hamburg. M. Jusserand's English 
Wayfaring Life in the Olden Times gives a vivid 
picture of the activity of travel in this country in 
the Middle Ages ; while a good historical novel 
like The Cloister and the Hearth owes no little of 
its vitality to its picture of the roads to Rome with 
their ever- varying procession of European life. 

Chaucer's company of cheery tale-tellers upon the 
Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury is but the art-con- 
served instance of what went on in every country, 
and to all its great national shrines. The magnifi- 
cence of Peterborough, of Cologne, or Compostella, 
had thus a far greater than any merely diocesan 
origin ; theirs was a national appeal, largely even 
an international one. Excelling all these in its turn 
was of course the great pilgrimage, that attracting 
Christendom to Rome ; again, beyond that, the 
yet greater, to Jerusalem the Pilgrimage indeed. 
As in every town of the Mohammedan world one 
sees the green turbans of those who have been to 
Mecca, so in any European townlet we may still 
search out the traces of their ancient pilgrims: 
witness, for instance, the frequency of the very name 
(commonly as " Palmer ") in Scotland or England. 
To the perpetual call of the two greatest of these 
pilgrimages, and the impassioning influence of the 
many who returned despite all hazards, at long last 
in safety, to stir the town with the news, and thrill 
its youth with their tales, the world owes, for good 



164 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and evil, the Crusades, and all that they imply. 
Peter the Hermit but concentrated and voiced a 
widespread sentiment which had been long in the 
making. 

As with merchant, adventurer, and friar, so with 
the students of the universities. The wandering 
scholars flocked to them from afar each autumn, each 
returning to his old home or wandering still farther 
with the return of summer. Yet none of these 
manifold threads of travel, nor perhaps all put 
together, can have equalled, in amount or in social 
significance, the wander-year of the young craftsman 
at the conclusion of his apprenticeship. For here 
was a great process of education ; in fact one of the 
very greatest of democratic movements in the history 
of education, and this on its truly higher level : one 
therefore which every democracy worth the name 
must seek to recover. It was no mere chance 
individual wandering in search of employment, as 
in modern times, such as the economist has too much 
disguised under his shallow euphemism of "the 
mobility of labour," but a system of education 
organised and supervised by the craft-guilds of cities, 
with no small degree of correspondence and co-opera- 
tion ; and it was even shrewdly examined upon at 
its close. Thus when the young man returned to 
his native town and detailed his journey, mentioning 
among other places a stay at Freiburg (im Breisgau), 
the leaders of his craft, as examining board, might 
ask him, " Where had he seen the devil weeping 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 165 

for bis sins ? " thus testing alike his visit to its great 
minster, and his eye for the quaint sculpture over 
its portal. The artistic interchanges of Italy with 
the Germanic lands have here deeply their explana- 
tion : Diirer in Italy, Holbein in England, are but 
supreme examples of the craftsman's wanderings. 

So with the interchange and development of 
literary culture. The Greek learning had been 
coming from Constantinople long before its final 
flight before the Turkish Conquest, as Florentine 
history so conspicuously shows : and the university- 
transforming and history-making journeyings of 
Erasmus are but the highest expression of the teach- 
ing and learning tradition everywhere. Goethe's 
Wilhelm Meister is no mere modern Odyssey of youth : 
its episode of the strolling players throws thus a vivid 
light upon the education of Ben Jonson, with his 
tramp to Hawthornden ; while Shakespeare, as critics 
of Macbeth suggest, may not improbably have come 
even further. 

Only with that great depression of the people, 
which is the tragic converse of the uplift of the 
scholars and gentlemen of the Renaissance, did the 
culture of travel become at all limited to the upper 
classes limiting itself more and more, until we get 
the characteristic phrase, the "Grand Tour," which 
my young lord made with his tutor, and often with 
no small result in culture and thought to them both. 
Witness for the lords their bringing home of the great 
picture-galleries of England; and for the tutors 



166 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and as complemental instances, first studious, then 
utilitarian the effect upon the world of Erasmus's 
journey to Italy as tutor to the young son of 
James IV. of Scotland; and again of Adam Smith's 
stay in Paris, with its physiocrats and philosophers, 
while tutor to the young chief of Buccleuch. 

It is worth noting here that the modern eminence 
of German universities, which in all countries we 
have learned so much to respect and profit by, is by 
no means so conspicuous when we merely compare 
this and that university in Germany with a correspond- 
ing institution of our own country. The German 
advantage is a wider one ; and lies especially here 
that while our youth at Oxford or Cambridge, at 
St Andrews or Edinburgh, commonly stay at their 
one university during the whole of their years of 
student life, their German contemporaries of the same 
standing have had, not once but several times over, 
the vivifying experience, the intellectual stimulus, of 
the new environment of a great university, a new 
culture city. 

From the pictures of the great mansion-houses the 
boy Ruskin, as he tells us, largely gained the funda- 
mental preparation of his artistic life, and of his own 
later familiarity with the treasure-houses of Italy ; 
and the analogous Italian culture of the Brownings 
is again but a conspicuous development of our old 
tradition of Italian travel. To such artistic pilgrimages 
are likewise due in no small measure the classicism of 
Paris its Prix de Rome, its Villa Medicis ; and also 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 167 

that revived interest in classic archaeology, which has 
left so deep an impression in our northern cities ; for 
the neo-classic monuments so characteristic of Munich, 
Copenhagen, and Edinburgh are developments from 
the same root. Our British and other schools of 
archaeology in Rome and Athens are naturally in the 
main still thought of and maintained as for historical 
inquirers ; but they are also becoming schools in 
which the town planner of the present, and still more 
the city designer of the future, may gather not only 
precedent, or even suggestion, but inspiration anew. 

Viewing all countries together, it is of course Italy 
which most richly rewards her pilgrims, as travellers 
of all other lands avow. Who that has seen her great 
cities will not say, with Henri de Regnier : 

" Pars, mon fils ; tu verras, comme j'ai pu les voir, 
Les trois Villes encore dont ma pensee est pleine ; 
La Cite florentine et la Cite romaine 
Et Venise endormie en or au fond du soir. 

Les trois Villes ainsi chantent dans ma memoire 
L''hymne de leur beaute et le bruit de leur gloire, 
Et mon coeur a leur nom vibre <Tun triple echo ! " 

Or more generally, in Carlyle's rendering of Goethe's 
famous verse : 

" Keep not standing fixed and rooted, 

Briskly venture, briskly roam, 
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it, 
And stout heart, are still at home. 

Sure enough for wandering was it, 
That the world was made so wide !" 



168 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

All this is but a faint indication of the full range 
and active spirit of our forefathers' travel, and enables 
us to see, what many a thoughtful traveller at the 
beginning of the Railway Age realised, and not 
merely Ruskin the colossal disadvantage of being 
swiftly projected from railway station to railway 
station, and missing all the varied experience, and 
most of the beauty of the way. The modern cyclist, 
the motorist, have of late years in some measure been 
recovering this. We thus see the large elements of 
reason in Ruskin's apparent madness of protest 
against railways ; but not yet fully enough. Only as 
that dawn of vital outdoor education, which our boy 
scouts begin to present over those cramped in school- 
rooms or even enclosed in playing-fields, progresses 
into the wider wanderings of which their recent camps 
(as at Boulogne, etc.) give earnest, shall we again 
adequately recover the old value and vitality of simple 
travel. In the past thirty years or so, the writer 
must have travelled forty or fifty thousand miles, by 
express train, between London and Edinburgh, but 
his educative journeys are still only one or two upon 
the Great North Road, on cycle, or with stoppage 
and ramble by the way. The train-habit, as we may 
call it, is to no small extent the explanation of the 
too common failure of the modern tourist, and has 
degraded him into mere material for excursion con- 
tractors, taken about in droves, nay, in coops, like 
fowls to market. In what previous period of travel 
could one have met with the like of these London 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP ]69 

ladies who think the Louvre such a nice place for 
bargains of the American whose impression of a 
visit to Rome was only revived as the "funny old 
place where you bought the yellow gloves " of the 
old gentleman who, after a bad dinner years ago, still 
growls at Florence ! And besides all these vacant 
folk, there are too many who flutter to the great 
cities like moths to the candle, lured by its brightness, 
falling into its flame. 

Plainly, then, we need preparation for travel ; an 
education which will make our youth immune to its 
evils, alive to its advantages. Nor is this after all so 
difficult. For a generation the writer has been stirring 
up the Scottish or London student of his acquaintance 
to go abroad, to this great continental university or 
another, according to his professional needs ; and 
above all to Paris. Why there especially ? First of 
all to be awakened, and then educated, in that keenest 
and brightest, most intellectual, most hard-working, 
and most productive of universities and cities ; first 
as specialist, but also as generaliser, as man of general 
culture, alive to the significance of the fine arts of 
poetry and drama, of criticism and of polite inter- 
course, and of the place and need of all these in social 
advance. Above all other reasons, however, the 
student should go to Paris to be moralised and 
this for two reasons. First, through general contact 
with what, with all its faults and blemishes though 
these are neither few nor small is yet on the whole 
the best, the most mutualised, most socialised, as well 



170 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

as most civilised of great city populations. Secondly, 
for the sake of that rare experience, still for a few 
years obtainable, of direct contact with, and impulse 
from, characters stirred by the terrible year of 1870-1, 
tempered in its furnace of affliction, and therefore 
developed, with a whiteness of intensity, to a con- 
tinuous stretch of efficiency unknown in our more 
peaceful cities, our less awakened lands. It is by the 
effort and combination of such characters, such 
workers, that there has steadily been worked out that 
magnificent renascence of France, which has well-nigh 
wiped out many of the evils of the decadent Empire, 
abated others, and increasingly grapples with them 
all ; and which has recovered for her in so many and 
varied departments of thought and action the veritable 
leadership of the civilised world. Here was the 
life-secret of Pasteur and of Berthelot, of the brothers 
Reclus, of Lavisse, Duclaux, and innumerable others 
of the great masters and thinkers who are no longer 
with us. Here too is the secret of the leaders of 
France at this day : a group of educators, therefore, 
still as a whole without parallel, whether for arts or 
sciences, for life-conduct and for citizenship. 

Yet France, as we noted in the first chapter, has 
not to any great extent our special problem of vast 
conurbations upon the coalfields, and of their in- 
dustries and minds too largely paleotechnic. She 
belongs in the main to an earlier and a later formation ; 
her peasant activity predominates throughout the 
land, while her metropolis and several of her leading 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 171 

cities are more fully advanced in neotechnic arts and 
sciences. 

Shall we, then, go to the United States, with their 
great and swiftly -growing cities ? Yes and no. Yes ; 
for in many respects the evolution process of American 
cities is plainly upon the very greatest scale, no longer 
merely in output of wealth, in increase of population, 
but also in quality of civilisation as well. In the 
fundamental industries, as so notably of iron and steel, 
America has overtaken and surpassed our output. 
As regards electrical and other factors of the neo- 
technic transition she also advances more rapidly. 
In matters of higher education she has, in the past 
generation especially, been swiftly advancing to the 
level of our older European universities ; and in 
public no less than in private generosity she is in 
many ways surpassing their utmost material foresight, 
often even their cultural ambitions. But as she 
ruefully admits, her citizenship has in the past suffered 
even more arrest and decay than our own, under the 
influence of the extreme economic individualism of 
her still too largely paleotechnic industry, her too in- 
dividualistic commerce and finance. Yet, happily, 
there is also in progress a great uplift of citizenship, 
a daily increasing arousal of responsibility which bids 
fair soon to place her cities in the very van. 

The recent outburst of city improvement and of 
town-planning schemes, and this from New England 
to California and back again schemes always large 
and ambitious, often comprehensive, even magnificent 



172 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

in conception affords ample and convincing evidence 
that before long the European citizen and town 
planner, of whatever nationality, may have to draw 
his best examples and incentives to civic reorgani- 
sation and evolution, and these not only in material 
achievements but in the moral uplifts which must 
ever lie back of them, from the great cities, the 
towns, even the very villages of the United States. 

Before me lie the plans of American cities, great 
and small. Here is Washington in its renewal upon 
a scale rivalling, in some ways surpassing, that of the 
greatest European capitals. Here Boston, with its 
magnificent park- system ; and others with correspond- 
ing examples of park-rings and nature-reserves without 
number, full of suggestion and of impulse to Europe. 
Indeed to some of these, the magnificent forest-girdle 
of Vienna is as yet the only adequate European 
parallel. Chicago gives us its comprehensive vision 
at once of a mighty metropolis and of a world- 
exhibition returned to stay. The rebuilding of San 
Francisco at least records its lost opportunities. 

Each of these American designs, beyond its im- 
pressive magnitude, displays unity of conception, 
sometimes only too severe. It has architectural 
ability as well as ambition ; and a sense of civic 
dignity, of national greatness. Yet may not the 
result, however monumental and .reposeful to our 
generation, as we are seeking to emerge from the 
confused jostle of modern individualism, be felt by 
our successors as too cold, too formal, and thus even 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 173 

monotonous ? From ancient Egypt to eighteenth- 
century London, to nineteenth-century Paris, twen- 
tieth-century Berlin, has it not ever been the fault 
of the generalising and masterful city architect to 
become so satisfied with his stately perspectives, his 
massive facades and formal proportions, as to forget 
the simpler beauties and graces which are needed by 
the people, above all demanded by the young ? And 
has he not thus provoked their rebound ? Hence 
these disastrous reactions, those outbreaks of confused 
detail, of childish ornament and of adult vulgarity, 
by which such sternly architectonic periods have ever 
been succeeded, as so notably in Victorian London 
after its stately Georgian days ? And is not this 
disastrous reaction inevitable, so long as such archi- 
tects continue to derive their inspiration mainly from 
the majesty of the State and of its Institutions ? 
too little from and towards the human interest of 
each neighbourhood, the individuality of its homes ? 
too rarely also from cultural vision and expression, 
from social and moral enthusiasms, from mystic and 
creative uplift ? There is much attractiveness in the 
more simple and domestic American town designing, 
like that of Olmsted for the model borough of 
Brookline. A younger generation of city designers, 
of whom the excellent city reports and other writings 
of Nolen, Mulford Robinson, and others are con- 
spicuous expressions, are no doubt on the way 
towards reconciling the claims of civic greatness with 
those of domestic and neighbourhood life. 



174 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Yet with all these grounds of respect for the great 
countries for the treasure-houses of Italy, for the 
initiatives and leaderships of France, for the un- 
paralleled energy and vital endeavour, the evolutionary 
promise of America, it is to German cities that we 
must now conduct the reader. For the vast develop- 
ment of modern Germany is by no means simply of 
that army which has so deeply impressed Paris, and 
with her all other Continental capitals, nor yet of that 
formidable fleet which has so much become the pre- 
occupation, almost the obsession, of London. The 
standpoint of the present volume is that of the main 
geographic and vital developments, urban and rustic, 
upon which national survival depends so much more 
than upon war; as all history shows, from ancient 
China to recent France. German power, even the 
fighting power which is such a dramatic element of 
this, must ultimately depend upon the measure and 
qualities of rustic and of urban development. Now, 
it is not a little to the German's advantage that his 
great economic progress has been so recent. He has 
swiftly utilised our more slowly gained industrial and 
commercial experience, and correspondingly abbrevi- 
ated the lesson, avoiding many of our paleotechnic 
evils. And with his more educated openness of 
mind, his more general and more specialised scientific 
culture, he has often fully entered upon the neotechnic 
phase of this or that industry, before we have even 
realised that we are lagging in the paleotechnic one. 
The loss of aniline colour manufactures, so often 



TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 175 

quoted in the country of Perkin, or of scientific 
apparatus making in that of James Watt and Lord 
Kelvin, are but conspicuous instances of this. 

It is still more important, however, from the 
present point of view, that German cities show us, 
and more than do any other at present, that fertilisa- 
tion of the youthful vigour of growth by elder and 
maturer life, upon which renewals of social life so 
much depend perhaps scarcely less than does the 
continuance of organic life itself. For in the heart 
of her great modern industrial and commercial 
centres the antique spirit of her great free cities of 
the Middle Age, which had never died away, is again 
beating with a new life. This is invigorating and 
directing city growth in ways which are compelling 
us of all countries, if we would advance our cities, 
once and again to visit Germany. We are now 
profiting by the example of her ancient yet more 
than modern cities, even as we have in the past 
generation learned all the world over from her 
universities for the most part so ancient, yet none 
the less effectively modern. 

Of her impulse to modern town planners much 
might be said ; but this has been well said already, 
from Horsfall's Example of Germany onwards, 
indeed by every subsequent writer and worker on 
the subject. Let us, then, profit by this general 
arousal of interest, and in the next chapters visit 
German cities in our turn. 



CHAPTER IX 

A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 

Use. of Town-Plairomg-Tetirs : a typical example. Cologne and its 
development. This and other German cities as examples of the 
principle of survival through civic policy rather than militarist spirit. 
Architectural characteristics : qualities and defects. Diisseldorf 
and its architecture and decoration ; varied expressiveness of these. 

WE must not unduly estimate as a civic event our 
recently instituted Town-Planning Tours to repre- 
sentative German cities, nor build too largely upon 
any immediate results from them : yet we may fairly 
take these as noteworthy symptoms, as contributory 
evidence of the civic awakening throughout our 
towns, and surely as a further aid towards this also. 
For a good many years past it has been a growing 
custom for this or that Municipal Committee, con- 
cerned with tramways or lighting, with cleansing or 
health, to go and see what has been done by their 
neighbours at home or abroad ; and on the whole 
with useful results. But, with rare exceptions, 
notably that of the Birmingham Housing Committee's 
Continental visit in 1905, we have as yet very few 
thorough-going municipal inquiries into town 
planning. Pending these, it is something that, year 
by year, well-nigh a hundred persons, mainly city 

176 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 177 

councillors and officials, largely also architects and 
others occupied with city improvement and extension, 
should join together on such pilgrimages ; and then, 
after a vivifying wealth of new impressions and of 
mutual contacts, should return to their own towns 
more convinced than before that something must be 
done;, and in some measure clearer about doing it. 
The movement of municipal inquiry and action which 
Mr Burns's Town Planning Act has effectively in- 
augurated for Britain, must thus be accelerated and 
influenced at many points and in innumerable indi- 
vidual ways. It is, of course, impossible to sum up 
dogmatically for a hundred people what may be the 
main result upon their minds of such rapid successions 
of experiences, such panoramic glimpses of great 
cities in growth and change. Still, there is some- 
thing in group-psychology, especially with such 
common purpose and common environment as here : 
a certain progress of ideas and feelings becomes fairly 
manifest among us as regards the problems of town 
extension and city development we come to study ; 
and this quite apart from the natural and unanimous 
response to that thoughtful hospitality and genuine 
helpfulness which are the gentle retaliation of German 
hosts for the alarmist shriekings amid which we may 
too often have left London. 

A broad summary, then, of the doings and learn- 
ings of such a town-planners' pilgrimage may not 
only afford the needed relief to the general arguments 

of the preceding chapters, but go far to supplement 

12 



178 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and illustrate them. Best of all, if it suggest to the 
reader that he may also go and do likewise. 

Here, then, in the old pilgrim city of Cologne at 
a recent Eastertide, we were a goodly company of 
islanders, well-nigh a hundred strong, and hailing 
from all parts of the two kingdoms from Aberdeen 
to Ayr, from Newcastle to Southampton, Bath to 
Rochester, in fact from the very length and breadth of 
the land, and from small towns -and great cities. Our 
tour was organised by the National Housing Reform 
Council, whose chairman headed us the late Alder- 
man Thompson, Mayor of Richmond, well known 
by his Handbooks of Housing, which are a veritable 
encyclopaedia of the housing and city improvement 
movements and their legislation throughout the world. 
Our working leader, shepherd and sheep-dog in one, 
was Henry Aldridge, the secretary of the same 
body, and active in the corresponding international 
ones. Of our members the civic fathers, with a few 
wideawake and foresighted town clerks, made up 
about a third ; city architects and surveyors and 
borough engineers, with a sprinkling of medical officers 
of health, made up a full third also ; while of the 
rest almost every one had some experience in housing 
or city improvement, either on the business side or 
on that of design or construction. The Garden City 
Association was well represented ; the active and 
growing " Co-partnership Tenants (Limited) " were 
out in force also. The Hampstead Garden Suburb 
and other village schemes throughout the land of 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 179 

which, without being invidious, one may specially 
note that admirable Woodlands colliery village, which 
should be so peculiarly suggestive to coalmasters 
and coalminers everywhere were all represented 
among us by their architects and others. There 
were chairmen of the various Town- Planning Com- 
mittees which are springing up in not a few of the 
principal towns now awakening to their needs, a 
handful of architects of note, largely chairmen of 
provincial architectural associations. The first Pro- 
fessor of Town Planning, from Liverpool (Mr Lever's 
recent foundation), must not be forgotten, nor yet 
the representative of France, albeit a solitary one ; 
for M. Augustin Rey, well known for the extra- 
ordinarily original and able designs for workmen's 
dwellings which gained him the Rothschild prize a 
few years ago, was also of the party, and in it all 
a Frenchman should be, vivacious and inspiring, 
generously appreciative yet penetratingly critical, 
courteous yet outspoken a man of authority there- 
fore alike among us and in the estimation of our 
German hosts. Finally came the active group of 
London newspaper correspondents who recorded our 
pilgrimage, and the three or four ladies who 
brightened it. 

Thanks to the good organisation of our leaders, 
and, we flatter ourselves, also to the widely repre- 
sentative variety of our members, the German cities 
have taken us most seriously, and we find that their 
splendid hospitality at once elaborate and dignified, 



180 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

as beseems their civic dignity, and thoughtful and 
detailed, as from men of administrative skill and care 
becomes genial and homely, personal and individual, 
as kindred interests and interchange of ideas and 
mutual appreciation bring us together. To be met 
so courteously and so helpfully, shown all things so 
openly, answered on all points so frankly, are surely 
the greatest satisfactions that travelling craftsmen 
and students can desire, and this has been our hourly 
portion ; indeed, in almost overpowering measure. 
On our arrival in Cologne we had but time to brush 
off the dust and break the fast of our long night 
journey from London to hasten to the Town House, 
where, in its stately old hall of ceremonies, after our 
official reception by the Burgomaster, we were edified 
by a full and carefully prepared lecture, well illus- 
trated and documented, and quaintly but intelligibly 
translated, which set before us first the small begin- 
nings of the city, from the Roman Camp above the 
Rhine ferry, and thence through many ups and downs 
in medieval and modern times to that marvellous 
expansion of the past generation from under 
100,000 in 1871 to nearly 'half a million to-day. 
Such a lecture might so far no doubt be given in 
one of our own Town Halls also, were we as fully 
awake to the roots in past history and permanent 
geography of our recent progress and present state ; 
but the lecturer the junior Burgomaster be it noted, 
not the antiquary nor the city treasurer, who with us 
would have to divide the task soon went beyond 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 181 

all this summary of past and present to what was 
obviously his main interest that opening future for 
which it is his pride and privilege to provide, and so 
unfalded to our astonished eyes the official and 
accepted plan of Cologne. This not only summarises 
in successive vividly coloured belts the expansions 
of old Cologne up to its recent ramparts, and thence 
to the more than doubling of the city since their 
removal in 1881 ; but beyond this again it sets out 
the future quarters and the main arteries of circula- 
tion for the growth anticipated within this twentieth 
century or less. This includes an area exceeding 
that of present-day Berlin itself, with its two and 
a half million inhabitants ! And though this vast 
area is, of course, to be laid out in much less crowded 
fashion than Berlin, and with parks, gardens, and 
boulevards on a more generous scale, we could not 
but wonder at the boldness, unprecedented in our 
British experience, indeed in the world's, which thus 
provides for an enlarging future. 

Our lecture over, we sallied forth to begin our 
rounds and see Cologne ; but instead of taking our 
own cabs, as everyday tourists fairly expect to do, 
here, to our no small surprise, were rows and rows of 
well-appointed private motors, each with its smart 
chauffeur, or sometimes its owner, at our service. 
Each vehicle, too, was thoughtfully adorned with a 
couple of little flags, the city's banner on one side 
and the Union Jack on the other. At a hint from 
the Burgomaster, himself a keen motorist, the Auto- 



182 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

mobile Club had turned out to do us the honours of 
their city ; and so in long procession, with his Wor- 
ship driving at our head, we spent the whole afternoon, 
and certainly saw more of Cologne in the time than 
most of its burghers can have done or are likely to 
do. Pauses were, of course, made ; one to climb the 
little hill of the Stadtwald, the large and pleasant 
forest park laid out nearest the country, and thence 
view the city in the distance, with its mighty minster 
spires rising above the smoke ; and another on our 
return to the start-point of a steamer journey down 
stream to view the river front. After this once more 
our motors were all in waiting to show us the southern 
quarter of the town, and at length to deposit us at 
our hotels. Yet even here there was barely time to 
efface the dust of travel, and dress for the " Ehren- 
trank," to which the Corporation had invited us. 
This was practically a public dinner, although its 
German name goes more frankly to its main business ; 
and so, with mutual toasts and innumerable English 
and German speeches, each more glowing and effusive 
than the last, our first day in Cologne came happily 
to its end. It is easy of course to overrate such 
functions ; for as story-telling was once the pastime 
of pilgrims and their hosts, and now oratory, the 
essential element of genial fiction remains much 
the same. 

Yet let us not underrate them; it is something 
that even a hundred citizens so fairly representative 
of our country, and for the most part also knowing 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 183 

little of Germany save what the passing day might 
tell them, and that not previously at first hand- 
should thus for themselves see that the strength of 
Germany lies not merely nor mainly in her armies 
and fleets, but in her cities and citizens ; and, having 
heard so much of her mailed fist, should have cause 
henceforward to remember her warm and friendly 
hand. It would be too much to expect from human 
nature that we should not be gently bantered about 
our national passion for constructing Dreadnoughts, 
or sometimes assured by English-speaking hosts that 
" we dread them not " ; but it is plain economics that 
these great commercial cities have much to lose and 
little to gain by war with us, or for that matter with 
any other of their neighbours, and what is still 
better that they know it. Despite the natural pride 
of victory over France a generation ago, one is 
surprised by the outspokenness with which the dis- 
advantages of that war are sometimes also recognised. 
The great fact which London so little knows, and 
which even our calmer communities are also in danger 
of forgetting is that " Germany " means not merely 
the " Junker- Preussen," which no doubt has in the 
past generation's politics so much spoken for her, 
but also " Biirger-Deutschland." Prussia, with its 
military aristocracy standing completely equipped for 
war from lofty spike-helmet to boots of monumental 
magnitude, is no doubt a formidable figure ; but we 
must not let this permanently obscure the Rhenish, 
Saxon, and Bavarian burgher, industrious, home- 



184 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

loving, and kindly, and of all Europeans through 
history most willing to live and let live. Yet he, 
too, has his survival policy his views as to the best 
means of carrying on the struggle for existence. In 
this policy during the nineteenth century, first the 
advantages of education, and, second, its practical ap- 
plications to industry and commerce, have been fore- 
most in his mind ; and these with the results we know. 
But he sees that civic efficiency and well-being are 
also of the first importance ; and that group-survival 
determines that of the individual far more than the 
older political economy has ever realised. He is thus 
renewing the civic life and organisation in which his 
past history is so much richer than ours, and so has 
new lessons to teach us. Hence it is that we town 
planners have to come to Germany ; and even that 
we turn round to our at present too purely politically- 
minded, military-minded countrymen, to remind them 
that whatever may be the importance for the survival 
of nations in the struggle for existence of fleets and 
armies, this is yet more determined, in the long run, 
by the efficiency of their regional development, and 
above all, of their cities and city-life. Behind all the 
superiorities we may pay for in would-be neotechnic 
fleets, we are at present plainly in a state of inferiority 
as regards our too paleotechnic cities ; and it is there- 
fore time to be attending to their rebuilding, their 
equipment, their health, education, and general 
efficiency. This surely should be accounted to us 
even for patriotism, for imperialism, and these at 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 185 

their very fullest and their best. And here, as even 
in most technical military advances, it is for the 
militarist to recognise the need and use of the more 
inventive, initiative, and even more organising mind 
of the civilian. 

We are shown the Giirzenich, the festal palace of 
the medieval municipality ; and then begins our per- 
ambulation from the old town through the new, and 
thence to the outmost limits of the future city, with 
rapid glimpses of quaint, if sometimes shimmy, old 
streets and more of broader and more formal new 
ones. Mostly, of course, our way runs through the 
modern business and the residential streets, with their 
extraordinary variety of architecture. Like our own 
at home, this is mostly bad, but bad in a rather 
different way. For while our Victorian architects 
have dabbled in every style medieval, Renaissance, 
eighteenth-century, and so on and vulgarised them 
badly enough, it was generally by weakening the 
original ; whereas here in Germany the tendency 
was to exaggerate and coarsen it. We alike over- 
load with ornament, for money must be displayed 
and wasted ; but after all we are rather ashamed 
of our showiness when done, and do not insist 
upon it, whereas the inferior German architect 
and his client are delighted with their perform- 
ance, and thrust it forward with all the prominence 
and profusion that the law of gravitation will 
allow. 

In Cologne, from its Cathedral to its boulevards, 



186 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the most prominent influence is that of Paris; for 
the former the style of the thirteenth century, but 
for the latter, alas ! too much the style of Napoleon III. 
and Baron Haussmann. In recent times, however, a 
new and potent influence has arisen in Germany, as 
a big block of shops, arcades, and business offices 
near the Cathedral reminds us a new style, which is 
fermenting all over Germany and breaking out here 
and there into more extraordinary fronts and interiors 
than the world has seen for long. This is the German 
form of "Art Nouveau," the style of Olbrich and 
other notable living or recent architects. The credit 
of its parentage, the responsibility therefore too, lies 
largely with Glasgow, of which the initiative and 
influence on the Continent in architecture have 
almost been as considerable as in painting. Since no 
man is a prophet in his own country, it is still some- 
thing of a surprise to the wandering Scot to find 
" Mackintosh " almost as accepted a descriptive term 
in architecture and this not only in Germany, but 
from Belgium to Hungary as in costume in Great 
Britain. We see his influence in city after city of 
course compounded with other elements, other 
personal equations. Even in the most gigantic and 
imposing new buildings, like the vast Tietz Stores in 
Diisseldorf designed by Olbrich, we have still the 
characteristic severe perpendicularity and horizontality 
of lines, the squared ornamentation, the alternately 
fairy and puckish tracery of Mr Mackintosh's Glasgow 
cafes, which have certainly been among the central 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 187 

and the most inspiring influences of this notable new 
movement and school. 

Another great influence, however, in German work 
reveals itself in such monuments as Bismarck's, near 
the head of the port in Cologne. Imagine a stern 
colossus, seated like an Egyptian monarch, but on a 
towering and battlemented throne, and in full 
medieval armour, leaning watchful upon a massive 
sword dark, grim, and threatening, even sinister and 
repellent, yet with an undeniable impressiveness of 
power. A monument very different therefore from 
the ordinary victory memorials of the popular and 
imperial melodramatic style, which one meets every- 
where in Germany, and which are the sorrow and 
shame of its art-lovers. This Bismarck is Prussia in 
person, the mailed fist within these peaceful burgher 
cities of the south, which were not so long ago little 
more in love with its rule than are Alsace and 
Lorraine to-day. He is well-placed, sitting there 
stout and grim in the square opposite the good 
Burgomaster's bright and elegant villa-mansion with its 
flower-garden the perfect symbol of that imperialist 
militarism and bureaucracy which has laid its grasp 
and domination upon the life and labour of the 
German citizen. This, at any rate, is the perspective 
which the world already sees, indeed too exclusively, 
whereas the opposite view is no less to be noted 
that of the civic life, pacific in its activities, its 
interests, and ideas. 

This spirit of imperial domination is finding many 



188 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

expressions in recent buildings, notably, for instance, 
in Diisseldorf, which also rewards perambulating up 
and down and in and around for many hours. Here 
the new building of the Steel Trust is startling in its 
frank and forceful expression of this newest and per- 
haps for the moment strongest of economic powers. 
The pride and display of wealth is manifest in all the 
palaces of modern capitalism, but rarely is, as here, so 
frankly that of power and achievement. The block 
is large enough to have its faades upon three streets 
and to dominate them all, and stands out conspicu- 
ously against the grey or white buildings of its neigh- 
bourhood and the trees of boulevard and public 
gardens by the intense red of its lofty walling, the 
green and golden tiles of its old German roof, above 
which again rises a low spire of leaden grey, yet 
bright also with gilded mouldings and crowned by 
its weather-vane, here appropriately a ship. The long 
mullions of the windows and the massive mouldings 
around them run down through all the upper storeys 
to the basement, while from this again huge pilasters 
rise to the cornice, each ending in the strangest capital, 
a fearsome grotesque of a type characteristic of recent 
Germany. Recall Boecklin's ruthless presentments 
of some of his fellow-citizens in Basle (for which 
pillorying of them he had, if we mistake not, to leave 
the town), and imagine this process of idealised por- 
traiture applied to the magnates of money and steel. 
Imagine, too, the same process of decoration applied 
upon an adjacent block of legal and business offices, 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 189 

their main ornament again colossal faces ranged below 
the eaves, no mere commonplace ornamental heads 
such as one can see over any bank portal, but a vivid 
and expressive series of grotesques, types of strong 
and wilful old age in all its intensity of individualisa- 
tion. Here proud and wrathful, there sly, calculating, 
covetous ; here sullen and melancholic, there grinning 
in evil ecstasies of gain or vanity, of lust or malice. 

Something like these, though in less obtrusive 
English fashion, is to be seen in Queen Anne's Gate 
in London, where some observant and bitter sculptor 
has lixed for us the faces of the stout old reprobates 
who were the last survivors of the orgies of the 
Restoration, and who lived on, in moral and physical 
disease, chuckling over the triumphs of their gilded 
youth. We are now far from Glasgow or modern 
London, which have, of course, no such people or is 
it no such artists now ? These new buildings, with 
their departure from previous conventions, their 
mingling of boastful expression of modern conditions 
with stinging criticism of them, stand in contrast to 
the commonplace street fronts round them as things 
of another world. They express, as nothing since the 
Renaissance palaces has done, the dominant spirit 
of the age, one of temporal powers of industry and 
wealth and war wealth won by strength and labour, 
by thought and forethought, by exchange or specula- 
tion, by exploitation or taxation, by conquest and 
indemnity. Spiritual powers are for practical pur- 
poses considered as extinct ; save, indeed, that the 



190 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

great cathedrals are valued as show places, baits for 
the tourist traffic which continues, in its profitableness, 
the pilgrimages of old. 

That this is no exaggeration each new building to 
which we are conducted with legitimate pride bears 
additional witness. Not far from the red and glowing 
devil's smithy of the Steel Trust we come to a yet 
more startling edifice, this time appropriately in form 
of a temple, with pediment and columns complete, 
but broad, unaspiring, almost low, yet all the more 
monumental, massive, almost cyclopean. Cyclopean, 
indeed, in its hugely heavy ground floor, or rather 
entrance basement, with its courses of gigantic stones, 
the upper and lower with a deep, dark, open space 
between, like the jaws of a mighty press, and this 
press repeated in tier above tier and in long horizontal 
perspective. The slender attenuated figures of the 
sculpture groups above the doors, the golden legend 
of Discount Company, Limited which illuminates 
the low, flat, far-spreading pediment, are scarcely 
needed to explain the meaning of this great new 
temple-palace. Such elaborations but complete this, 
that he that runs may read ; so that only one more 
detail of decoration might still be added upon the 
broad, plain, hewn-stone gable a mosaic in red and 
gold, of Watts's " Mammon upon his Throne." The 
bank directors have not, of course, quite this view of 
their building ; it admirably serves their purpose, not 
only of use but of display : as an advertisement of 
their magnitude and their stability, over half Germany, 



A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 191 

nothing more excellent could be desired. Yet if we 
think our German friends a little lacking in their 
sense of humour, a little slow in the uptake, we are 
by no means just. Here, for instance, over the door 
of this fine new higher grade girls' school, a building 
as sober in detail and as restrained in general effect 
as British taste or convention could desire, we note 
over the entrance door but one small ornament but 
this an owl's face, with spectacles, and these askew 
and ready to fall. The old spirit of civic freedom 
must submit, no doubt, to the established order ; but 
this cannot prevent it from having its jest at its 
expense. In small things or in great the German 
burgher and artist have a good deal of what we 
commonly think of as French directness, the habit of 
looking facts in the face, and of expressing their view 
of them with at least the courage of their opinions. 
Prussia, too, no less than France, has her note of 
bitter wit, her flash of sarcasm ; moreover, we are in 
Diisseldorf, Heine's own town, and which keeps much 
of his and its French radical spirit to this day : more, 
in fact, than Berlin or Emperor William quite 
approves, if all stories be true. What now has all 
this criticism of modern German architecture to do 
with its town planning ? More perhaps than either 
most of our countrymen or their hospitable guides 
yet realise, as we shall see in the next chapter. 



CHAPTER X 

GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 

German Railway Stations as illustrative of better organisation than in 
other countries. Frankfort New Docks as a masterpiece of town 
planning, in its co-ordination of port and railway, engineering and 
commercial activities, and above all in its systematic provision of 
housing, with gardens, parks, etc., for its dockers. General criticisms 
of German methods : their recent progress. Camillo Sitte's rehabili- 
tation of medieval town planning. Limitations of German methods : 
advantage of English cottage system (Letchworth, Hampstead, etc.) 
now being admitted in Germany, and provided at Ulm. 

Applications to British cities, and to industrial progress generally. 
Criticism of the London Docks scheme. Conclusions. 

To understand the character or the origins of German 
town planning we must observe something of that 
order and regulation both of surroundings and of 
life which is so manifest around us. Of Prussian 
militarism and Imperial bureaucracy we are not here 
to speak ; their qualities are known to all the world, 
their defects not unknown also. But from the State 
railways, strategic or other, to the corresponding 
development of railway stations, is a necessary step ; 
and the space and the arrangement of these within 
the ample accesses to and from the city impress us 
as something rarely even attempted in this country 
though the laying out of Euston Station shows us 

192 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 193 

what considerable elements of civic design we have 
mostly thrown away throughout Great Britain. The 
stations of the great German cities, although necessarily 
the best known, are not nowadays the best. That 
of Frankfort, for instance, which twenty years ago 
was a world's wonder, is far surpassed not in size 
but in arrangement, in convenience, in proportional 
economy, yet in architectural beauty by the more 
recent construction of younger and less important 
towns. That of Wiesbaden, for instance, is a marvel 
of good design. Its booking-hall is not merely free 
of that mixture of sordid ugliness with coarse and 
showy ornament so common with us ; it is corre- 
spondingly relieved from that bustle and puzzle, that 
hurry-scurry and disorder, both of passengers and of 
baggage, to which we are so painfully accustomed. 
So striking, yet so effortless is the ordinary progress 
of affairs in such a station despite no lack of active 
circulation, be it understood that we pause awhile 
amid a group of eager architects to make out it? 
explanation. This, we are all agreed, lies in admirable 
general planning and fully studied arrangements in 
detail. Entrances and exits are spacious and perfectly 
placed in relation to each other ; the main hall is 
kept clear, not blocked with the wooden shanties 
which with us so often interrupt direct view and 
passage ; booking and baggage have each their side 
of the hall, all operations concerned with the latter 
being provided for within a nobly arched recess or 

transept, so leaving the main body of the hall 

13 



194 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

uninterrupted for thoroughfare and for that clear and 
self-possessed view of one's immediate arrangements 
which is so essential. The information and booking 
arrangements particularly interest us. A large recess 
is subdivided into a threefold chamber by vertical 
screens, and these plainly labelled " Maps," " Time- 
tables," " Fares," with the respective particulars, so 
that the passenger is trained to take care of himself, 
and the time of the company's servants is saved 
accordingly. Again, at the outer entrance one finds 
a set of slot machines, but here architecturally treated 
as wall-features and for practical purposes the first 
for providing those penny platform access tickets 
everywhere required for non-passengers ; the next 
for supplying the ticket most frequently required, 
that to the nearest town, so saving ticket clerks not 
a little. At the ticket offices proper further time- 
and trouble-saving devices are employed ; thus, when 
traffic presses at any point, the usual window closes, 
and one on each side is opened for stations A to K 
and L to Z respectively, the passengers again sorting 
themselves out without difficulty. Such economies 
of time and labour, such intelligent co-operation of 
the public, may be dubbed " impracticable " by those 
who have not seen them working ; yet neither by 
natural intelligence nor readiness of adaptation need 
we think ourselves inferior to German travellers. But 
our eyes are so blurred, our nerves so worn, our 
tempers so strained by the hideous huddle of advertise- 
ments on every wall, obstacles on every side, noises 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 195 

in either ear, that we can but muddle through, arriv- 
ing at our train or destination no doubt, but in a more 
or less battered condition, and so far disadvantaged 
in our life-struggle from the very beginning of every 
day. If but one of our stations could be Germanised 
by some such hygienist-engineer as here designs them, 
the example would soon be insisted on by the public, 
and carried out with profit, despite advertisement 
losses, by the companies. So much, then, for one 
of the actual factors which have at once made for 
town-planning schemes and helped to educate their 
designers. Now for a larger example. 

The British engineer has so long held pre-eminence 
that neither he nor we readily realise that he has in 
certain ways to begin his education here anew. I do 
not of course speak of his special tasks, of mechanical, 
electrical, or civil engineering ; though in each of 
these there are whispers that he may also learn from 
as well as teach his younger Continental brethren. 
Where the German engineer impresses us laymen is 
that instead of concentrating upon his immediate 
problem, say, of station or port alone, and this in 
indifference to its effect upon the town witness the 
more than usually huge, hideous, and ill-planned 
stations of Edinburgh he sees his task in relation to 
the community who are to use this, to the workers 
who are to serve in it. He does his utmost to meet 
the claims of health and housing, and even of that 
civic amenity which with us has been so long over- 
looked and therefore destroyed, but which we are 



106 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

now recognising when almost too late as an indispens- 
able element of human happiness and social progress, 
and even of material prosperity. Of this changed 
attitude of mind and its material outcome there can 
be no better illustration than the magnificent new 
port of Frankfort-on -the- Main. This we have been 
shown in lecture, on plan, and in visit, with the 
fullest detail, and with legitimate pride. Here, in 
the twentieth century, Frankfort is repeating the 
example of Glasgow in 1780, and adapting its river 
to the ever vaster commerce and deepening draught 
of the opening time. But note the way in which 
this greatest of problems for such river cities is now 
handled. First the whole needful space for the 
proposed port extension is acquired by the city, and 
over 1000 acres are clearly planned out from the very 
start. A hundred acres of this is water-surface, and 
the disposition of this into a series of minor havens 
for shipping, for coal and wood, for manufactures, 
etc., with a total of nearly eight miles of quays, 
determines the corresponding groupings of depots, 
warehouses, and stores, and of factories of different 
kinds ; while to serve this new quarter forty miles of 
new railway line are also being laid down. Along 
with this commercial and industrial expansion the 
corresponding growth of population is similarly 
being provided for, not left to the chances of 
speculation, as with us. Over twenty-five miles of 
new streets are being laid out, including two long 
boulevards, one with a garden promenade. Two 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 197 
main types of house are to prevail, the larger of three 




Bi I 

FIG. 40. Frankfort new docks. Note specialised havens, railway lines to 
industrial quarters; also dockers' village, with garden boulevards, park 
and lake. 

rooms with a habitable kitchen, the smaller with 
two rooms and a kitchen, and grouped, as usual in 



198 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Germany as in Scotland, in flatted tenements ; but 
for the first time in Frankfort it is proposed to follow 
English example and have also a village of workmen's 
cottages as well. Not only are there trees in the 
larger streets as well as in the boulevards, but a park 
for this new neighbourhood is also being provided, 
with playgrounds for children and facilities for 
games also. A swimming-bath too is not forgotten. 
Finally, to assure opportunity of direct touch with 
Nature, the town's forest is being extended to meet 
the new park. 

Here, then, in progress is a complete example of 
German town planning to-day the attempt to meet, 
no longer piecemeal and from day to day, but with 
intelligent foresight, the complex needs of a great 
town of progressing affairs and growing population, 
and of supplying the demands of modern industry 
without forgetting those of modern populations. 
Place, work, and folk environment, function, and 
organism are thus no longer viewed apart, but as 
the elements of a single process that of healthy life 
for the community and the individual. We do not, 
of course, say our German cousins are completely 
successful : we have our criticisms to make ; yet it is 
much to have shown us such an example. 

In the great development of railway systems, of 
river navigation, canal systems, and inland ports, of 
course with a corresponding increase of populations, 
we see the civil engineer naturally developing into 
the town planner. The skilful and far-sighted organ- 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 199 

isation of the arts of war, in which Prussia has given 
the world so many lessons, has had an influence on 
the arts of peace far exceeding anything since the 
days of Napoleon, or at least their would-be revival 
under the Second Empire, to which that of Germany 
presents not a few resemblances also. The burgher 
rule of the once-free cities has thus become more 
organised, more homogeneous throughout the Empire ; 
and with this the old burgomasters, once answering 
to Scots provosts (magistrates of longer tenure of 
office than English mayors), have become a profession 
of administrators, highly efficient, but first of all 
officials. Continuity of policy is more assured upon 
this system ; undertakings are more readily gone into 
upon a large scale, and the local civic tradition tends 
to be brought more rapidly into contact with the largest 
conceptions of economic development, of national pro- 
gress, and of imperial greatness. But do these pro- 
fessional burgomasters and city planners as fully inherit 
the best traditions, the ancient spirit of the city which 
the chances of life have given them to rule as did its 
own children in the days of its historic grandeur as 
one of the free cities of the Empire ? And under 
their rule, conscientious, strenuous, and capable 
though it be, can we hope for any considerable 
renewal of the old blossomings of art, of culture, and 
of policy to which history and monuments alike 
testify so richly? Such are some of the questions 
which keep arising in the background of our minds. 
As our hosts show us their accomplished works, their 



200 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

plans and projects for the future, we are impressed 
by their high average of skill, intelligence, and fore- 
sight, and by the way these all testify to the higher 
professional training, the larger outlook of a people 
more educated and more ambitious than our own ; 
yet at times also we feel a certain disappointment. 
Their best design is not so good as it should be : it 
lacks something of the spontaneity and originality, 
invention and freedom, of the artist proper, and hence 
falls short of the few best things which recent England 
has to show. Dr Stuebben, the great authority on 
town planning, to whom Cologne and now Berlin 
owes the direction and general design of its con- 
temporary expansion, is, despite all his unquestionable 
merits, too much of a Haussmann redivivus ; and he 
also, in his restrained way, loses that touch of light- 
ness and exuberance, that expression of the joy of 
life, which enlivens the official monotony of modern 
Paris. His successor in Cologne realises this, and is 
modifying his designs in detail as fast as may be in 
harmony with the later and freer taste. Gently 
curved streets now r tend to replace straight ones. 
Haussmann's star crossings, widely-opened squares, 
and other pompous and mistaken forms of laying out 
are being abandoned for simpler, more economical, 
yet more beautiful street-junctions ; and new places 
are inspired by older models. 

After the influence of Haussmann and Stuebben 
there has also come in that of Camillo Sitte, that 
admirable architect of Vienna, who has done for the 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 201 

appreciation of the medieval city as a whole what 
the romantic revival did for its cathedral or town- 
house. Since then we have come to forget that these 
were once regarded as chaotic and barbarous, and that 
the very name of " Gothic " was given to pointed 
architecture as a term of contempt and abuse. But 
while we have learned better as to the separate build- 
ings, and so admire what our grandfathers reviled, 
we have remained under the impression that the 
quaint and curved and complex street network of the 
medieval city was of mere accidental growth, and 
that the narrow streets surrounding the cathedral and 
the buildings clustered and crowded around its walls 
were thus only fit to be cleared away, so leaving the 
cathedral exposed to full view on all sides. Hence 
the nineteenth-century cathedral restorers and city 
improvers have united their forces towards such clear- 
ances, of course at vast sacrifice and expense, and 
thus it is that all manner of old churches, small or 
great, from St Giles's at Edinburgh to Notre Dame 
de Paris, now stand isolated, each upon its modern 
place often, indeed, as at Cologne, surrounded by 
modern hotels on all sides, with unlimited tramway 
developments, not to mention the exuberant display 
of a big railway station not by any means deserving 
such a eulogy as do some of its later rivals, and in 
any case inappropriate here. But while we in British 
cities are still for the most part cheerfully proceeding 
with the removal of such characteristic minor features 
of the past as are necessary to isolate our monuments, 



202 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and set them in the midst of the incongruous and 
transient utilitarian ugliness of the present, it has 
been the great achievement of Camillo Sitte's memor- 
able book to convince architects and art lovers 
generally that the antique city planners knew what 
they were doing better than we had ever realised, 
that their crowding up of the cathedral was no mere 
concession to the exigencies of space within a populous 
and small walled city, but was also the very condition 
of its towering sublimity, the artistic enhancement of 
its effect. Thus, in fact, it has come to pass that 
German cities are repenting themselves, late in the 
day though it be, of these too sweeping improvements, 
and are actually taking counsel even, as at Cologne, 
having architectural competitions as to the best 
way of building up their old cathedral place once 
more ! Could the whirligig of time more fully bring 
its revenges ? 

It looks, in fact, as if the great and progressive 
cities had been experimenting for the benefit of the 
smaller and slower-moving ones, and as if they were 
increasingly to be viewed, not so much as in the last 
generation, as examples, but in some respects also as 
warnings. Can the vast schemes of city extension 
of Cologne or Dtisseldorf really satisfy the coming 
generation, who will have to inhabit them ? We 
venture to think not. Moreover, beside the archi- 
tectural criticism, it is time to be coming to the 
economic one that this comprehensive town plan- 
ning, with all its merits, has brought with it not 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 203 

only municipal outlays which the town must pay 
for, but an unforeseen and not easily prevented de- 
velopment of land speculation ; and that the inflation 
of land values which this involves is keeping detached 
houses, or even semi-detached villas, within the reach 
of only the very well-to-do. For the mass of the 
people the utmost that is being done under these 
conditions is to get them into broader and more airy 
streets, with proximity no doubt to boulevard and 
park, such as our townsfolk might often envy, but 
with a fixation of those tenement conditions from 
which Continental cities, like Scottish ones, have so 
long suffered, and which it is the rare good fortune 
of English towns, with all their dulness and muddle 
and confusion, to have escaped in the main hitherto. 
Hence, despite all our admiration of the comprehen- 
siveness* of the German conception of town planning, 
we also learn here in Germany to think of the loose- 
spread English towns with increasing respect. That 
Battersea is in many ways but a poor little place 
beside Berlin is obvious enough ; but for its popula- 
tion of under 200,000, as Mr Burns proudly reminds 
us, it has more individual houses than Berlin with 
over two millions, lodged as these are for the most 
part in towering tenements, be these arranged in well- 
to-do flats or humble ones. The more moderate 
land values consistent with a small population per 
acre admit of the continuance of the cottage system, 
and even of its substantial improvement, its trans- 
formation more and more if not indeed to the type 



204 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

of Garden City and Hampstead Suburb, at least to 
something fairly approaching these. Whereas given 
the high land values evolved by crowded habitations 
in old quarters, maintained by city outlays and en- 
hanced by free speculation, how can the German city 
practically hope to reduce these, to admit of loosen- 
ing out the population to that comparative thinness 
per acre which all agree is necessary for healthy 
continuance ? At Ulm the city has been unusually 
alive to this problem. A wise burgomaster and 
town council have been purchasing all the available 
land in the neighbourhood, and are now succeeding 
in establishing good beginnings of garden villages for 
its workmen in suburbs more nearly corresponding to 
Mr Unwin's masterpiece at Hampstead than one can 
often as yet see in Germany. At Cologne, Diisseldorf, 
etc., the need of such cottage suburbs is at length 
becoming recognised, but their creation under the 
circumstances indicated above is now no easy matter. 

The historic and artistic spirit is far more manifest 
in Frankfort and in Cologne, and as we proceed east- 
wards it grows even more influential. Nuremberg 
and Rothenburg thus afford a delightful conclusion 
for such a tour as we have been making. Here 
indeed we have two types admittedly superior on 
the whole to any others in Germany : one of the 
great city, the other of the small; and each living 
on, well based upon its old foundations and activities ; 
in the one case of world commerce and art manu- 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 205 

factures, in the other of homely rusticity, simple yet 
educated and refined, These two towns, then, 
especially teach the lesson town planners everywhere 
most need, that town planning is not something 
which can be done from above, on general principles 
easily laid down, which can be learned in one place 
and imitated in another that way Haussmannism 
lies. It is the development of a local life, a regional 
character, a civic spirit, a unique individuality, 
capable of course of growth and expansion, of im- 
provement and development in many ways, of pro- 
fiting too by the example and criticism of others, 
yet always in its own way and upon its own founda- 
tions. Thus the renewed art of Town Planning has 
to develop into an art yet higher, that of City Design 
a veritable orchestration of all the arts, and corre- 
spondingly needing, even for its preliminary surveys, 
all the social sciences. Here, then, is the problem 
before us on our return to survey our modern towns, 
our ancient cities anew, to decipher their origins 
and trace their growth, to preserve their surviving 
memorials and to continue all that is vital in their 
local life ; and on this historic foundation, and on a 
corresponding survey and constructive criticism of 
our actual present, go forward to plan out a bettering 
future with such individual and collective foresight 
as we may. 

From Germany, when we come home again, we 
are naturally asked Well, what are we to do here ? 
The answer is not easy ; there are so many answers. 



206 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Learn from Germany ? Certainly yes ! Imitate 
Germany ? Certainly no. With all her plannings, 
with all her commanding foresight, her public enter- 
prise, it is still from Letch worth and Hampstead, 
from Woodlands and Earswick, and the like, as of 
course from the old-world villages they continue to 
renew, that we may best learn to house our people 
in moderate numbers to the acre, and with that most 
essential of conditions of health for children, wife, and 
man alike that is, of cottage and garden. In 
Scotland we forget this. The evil Continental tradi- 
tion of walled cities and crowded population, and 
consequent persistence of high site values, still weighs 
heavily upon our long war-worn land, so that even 
at new industrial villages say Duddingston, a mile 
out from Edinburgh the brewery workers' tene- 
ments are already towering up as high as the malt 
barns. Here, too, our workers are still even more 
ignorant and thoughtless of their own health than 
are we of theirs. How many people of any class in 
our Scottish cities, though every one has its medical 
school, know that one of our best Edinburgh gyne- 
cologists was accustomed to point out that there is 
a distinct stratum of women's ill-health, and with 
this of children's also, on the fourth storey, and of 
course upwards? Why? Because while a woman 
will contentedly go up and down one stair or two, 
or even three, the fourth is the last straw, and when 
carrying a basket on one arm and a baby on the 
other a very substantial one. She is thus physically 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 207 

overstrained, and so becomes liable to one class of 
complaints and more ; she at least gets into the 
habit of going out as little as possible, which of course 
opens the way to new series of ailments, while it 
enfeebles the children from the very beginning. For 
similar reasons the high, separate family houses of the 
familiar well-to-do London type can no longer so 
easily get servants ; and so far well. In every way. 
then, high dwellings are to be discouraged. Hence, 
as our "health-conscience" develops, and as well- 
being, success in life, and so on come to be reckoned 
less habitually in money- wages, and more in terms 
of the real environment which these are only of use 
to buy, the high houses of German or Scottish towns 
must tend to be abandoned in favour of the cottages 
of the coming garden suburbs. Still, as the working 
family under existing conditions cannot afford a new 
house with adequate number of rooms for its members, 
they will increasingly find the present small middle- 
class flats in high dwellings as these become vacated 
for separate houses, or garden-suburb cottages more 
readily within their means. Thus also a too dis- 
astrously rapid depreciation of such properties tends 
to be mitigated. 

Though some have found fault with Mr Burns for 
not giving complete and immediate powers in his 
Town Planning Act to municipalities at once to 
scheme out vast future areas in German fashion and 
to deal with existing built areas as sweepingly as 
Haussmann did with Old Paris, his caution is also 



208 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

to be praised. We are not ripe for such magnificent 
schemes ; we are not to be trusted with such sweep- 
ing changes. To plan suburbs here and there is 
something to begin with, and these will react as fast 
and as deeply on the existing town as it can well 
afford. Moreover, we can soon take larger powers 
when we have learned more fully how to use the 
proposed ones. Can nothing else be done mean- 
while ? Much ; for the recent discussion of the 
Town Planning Bill and Act has certainly begun the 
most critical period in the history of cities since their 
great expansions with the Manufacturing and the 
Railway Age. The " Reform Bill Atlases" of 1832 
for Scottish and English towns are here well worth 
consultation. On each page we have practically still 
the little old-fashioned town, much as it was in the 
Middle Ages, its few and narrow streets still mainly 
the obvious crossings or convergence of the country 
roads around. But outside its group of dwellings 
altogether sweeps a wide red line, sometimes far into 
the fields, the parliamentary boundary, with its 
allowance for the then expected growth. Pity that 
this foresight, like political thinking so largely, was 
not brought down from its high parliamentary level 
upon the concrete area it included : for here would 
have been our town plan two full generations earlier ; 
and with this how much wealth and time, health and 
happiness, might have been saved ? Not but that 
there were already beginnings of town plans, even 
partial realisations of them indeed, far earlier ; 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 209 

witness not only the classic case of the New Town 
of Edinburgh, and much of Bath also, as well as 
much of the best of London, but examples in smaller 
towns as well ; notably the stately lay-out of Buxton, 
or of the newer parts of Perth to north and south, 
with their formal terraces overlooking the magnificent 
Inches. But all these belonged to the spacious and 
enlightened period of the late eighteenth century. 
With the Napoleonic wars, and with the expansion 
of production and the low state of depression of the 
producers which accompanied and followed these, all 
the designs of worthy city development were lost 
sight of or thrown aside. Thus that main mass of 
the modern town, which is already our curse and 
incubus, was swiftly heaped together ; mean cottage- 
rows, or barrack tenements with slummy common 
stairs, for the workers ; ugly house-rows, or desolately 
respectable, semi-sanitary flats for the bulk of the 
middle classes ; and even for the richest the dreariest 
mansions, the ugliest villas the eye of man has ever 
seen. 

This bulk, then, of these our everyday towns is 
not normal but abnormal, waiting to be scrapped 
with other evil fashions of a by-going age. For 
tradition of towns worth living in, our few medieval 
or ciarly renascence houses and monuments, as in 
Chester, or York, or Old Edinburgh ; and our 
eighteenth-century dwellings, as in Bloomsbury or 
New Edinburgh, are, each in their way, far more 

inspiring and serviceable, more enduring probably 

14 



210 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

also, than is the vast mass of nineteenth -century 
growth. 

Practically, then, our immediate need is educa- 
tional most effectively through a Civic Exhibition, 
and this twofold. First and most easily realised, a 
local exhibition in each city; and essentially of its 
own site and origins, its own best past, its present 
good and bad alike, its possible opening future also. 
But beside this we need a great exhibition : of a 
type better than international ones, which may mean 
anything or nothing an Inter-Civic Exhibition- 
showing what great cities have been, what the best 
of them still are, above all what they aspire to be. 
Upon the irregular and broken ascent of man, though 
so often sadly turned back and delayed, he has once 
and again grown conscious not only of his own 
personal self and family, or of his social group or 
clan, his tribe or nation, but also of his great social 
hive, the city : at times again, as lately, and largely 
still, he has become forgetful of this. But all history 
confirms in detail of life and art what language pre- 
serves in literal word, that not only " politics " but 
"civilisation" itself are essentially products, not of 
the individual, but of the city. Of such civic exhi- 
bitions there have been many initiatives, that of Alt 
und Neu Coin in 1913 and that of Dublin in 1914 
may be especially remembered ; while inter-civic com- 
parison has reached a widely comprehensive inter- 
national level in Lyons with 1914. 

Too many of our German hosts, and still more, I 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 

fear, of us, their guests, are plainly accustomed to 
think of town planning as an art of compass and rule, 
a matter to be worked out, between engineers and 
architects almost alone, and for their town councils. 
But the true town plan, the only one worth having, 
is the outcome and flower of the whole civilisation 
of a community and of an age. While starting from 
its fundamentals, of port and road, of market and 
depot ; and from its essentials, too, of family dwell- 
ings worthy to be permanent and hereditary homes, 
it develops onwards to the supreme organs of the 
city's life its acropolis and forum, its cloister and 
cathedral. Now in our day we have again to develop 
the equivalents of all these. It is, in fact, for lack 
of these that our cities reek with evils. The psychol- 
ogy and treatment of our besetting sin and national 
disgrace of alcoholism is no such simple matter as we 
think. For the individual the Celt especially 
drunkenness is times without number a perversion of 
mysticism. For the community Scottish especially 
it is the nemesis of the repression at one time by 
asectic puritan, or at another by mammonist 
utilitarian, of the natural >joy, the Dionysiac ecstasy 
of life. To progress from our recent conditions to 
public sanitation and housing has been much, and to 
dream of garden cities and garden suburbs, and here 
and there to begin realising them, is far more. More 
important still, however, is the next step, that from 
such town extension planning towards city develop- 
ment. But where is this movement to be adequately 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

initiated ? Well, why not in Liverpool ? in Birming- 
ham ? or, say, in Glasgow ? where the need is at its 
very sorest ? Its glorious Clyde valley, that great 
fiord with its mountain shores, its lovely isles, is an 
admirable natural region, till lately (and why not 
again ?) of the fairest of the earth. Here, too, in 
rare degree are the resources of population, of 
intelligence and science and skill, of constructive and 
organising power, of artistic and architectural 
originality, even of social feeling and civic statesman- 
ship as well : why, then, may not the neotechnic city 
here most readily replace the paleotechnic one ? 

It is not Germany which will save us, not Berlin, 
nor Paris ; not Letchworth nor Hampstead either ; 
though each can give its lesson. Or take Glasgow, 
as worst-housed of modern cities. In that industrial 
evolution which is the determinant process of modern 
history, it has been foremost in invention and initiative, 
and this once and again. The modern man, with 
Watt's steam-engine as burden upon his back, with 
Smith's Wealth of Individuals clasped to his bosom, 
is essentially that is, both practically and spiritually 
the citizen of eighteenth-century Glasgow, though 
he be now housed in one of its distant manufact- 
uring suburbs, called Birmingham, Bermondsey, or 
Brooklyn. Again, here is his son, for whom electricity 
is replacing steam, and for whom some tincture of 
more social and moral philosophy is replacing the old 
hard-shell individualism. Be he from Oxford or 
Cornell or Charlottenburg, is he not still young 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 

Glasgow at its best, disciple of Caird or of Kelvin ? 
Why, then, need we despair of a third movement, 
also already here, in which the artistic originality 
which has stirred all Europe, and this alike in paint- 
ing and architecture, the yet mightier architecture 
of the ship, in which the Clyde still claims to lead 
all rivals, may be combined with the civic statesman- 
ship which has won modern Glasgow perhaps her 
widest and most honourable fame of all ? This surely 
would be the fitting crown of all these repeated in- 
itiatives, this pre-eminent world-leadership of the 
technic age. Quite definitely in Glasgow to-day 
there meet so far no doubt everywhere, yet here in 
their very intensest form all the conditions of civic 
and national decadence on one hand, and all the 
resources of recuperation on the other. Let us set 
about fully surveying the problem, meditating and 
testing the policy ; and soon it might be the turn of 
German town planners to cross from Rhine to Clyde. 
At best, however, for years to come, we cannot 
fully overtake the progress of the German city, with 
its many years' start of us, its ever-increasing thought 
and effort. Let us briefly sum up, then, our main 
impressions of what it has to teach us. To those 
who were visiting German cities for the first time, 
and even to those of us who knew them previously, 
their historic greatness, their characteristic individu- 
ality and legitimate civic pride, their vigorous grap- 
pling with present-day problems, and, above all, the 
breadth and boldness of their preparations for an 



i 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

enlarging future, made up a daily lesson which none 
of us are likely to forget. At home we have our 
historians absorbed in the past, our business men in 
the present, our Utopians in the future ; but each 
is as yet isolated in his own aspect of the moving 
world. Whereas, to see that your German burgo- 
master or councillor, official or citizen, is much of all 
these three rolled into one that I take to be one 
of the best and most needed lessons of such a journey, 
one of the suggestions which may be most fruitful 
after home-coming. It is much for the lovers of the 
past that historic memories and associations are not, 
as with us, forgotten, or sneered at as sentimental 
if revived, but are known and valued as the spiritual 
heritage of the community ; that ancient places and 
monuments, old-time streets and houses are not 
swept away wholesale on this or that crude pretext 
of convenience or of sanitation, but are cleansed and 
conserved as the very nucleus of the city's material 
heritage. It is a mental illumination, too, for our 
" practical man " to see not only education and health 
held in higher esteem than with ourselves, but natural 
beauty preserved, developed, rendered accessible to 
all, from river-front to mountain-forest ; to see, too, 
that art is not something outside everyday life, some- 
thing " unpractical," at best to be grudgingly supplied 
in schools as a reputed aid towards the design of 
marketable commodities ; but something to be viewed 
and treated as a worthy and social end in itself in 
architecture, sculpture, and painting, in concert, drama, 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 215 

and opera. To us, who so largely belong to towns 
greater in number of population, and proportionally 
even richer in monetary wealth than are these German 
ones, it is the most useful of experiences to see civic 
greatness estimated in more spiritual elements, and 
public wealth more applied than with ourselves 
towards creating an environment of material beauty 
and general well-being. 

Again, it is good for John Bull, with his robust 
immunity to every science, and his one cherished 
metaphysical theory that there is no such thing as 
theory, and no use for it if there is to meet business 
people city fathers, men in large affairs, who are 
yet open to social and speculative thought, who are 
boldly applying and generously advancing all the 
science of their age on every hand, and who are daily 
growing clearer-headed, richer, and more powerful in 
consequence. 

We have all had impressed upon us the contrast 
in matters military between Marshal Moltke in his 
staff-office and Major Muddlethrough in his easy- 
chair ; and of naval alarms we have surely had enough 
and to spare also. But there remains a real and use- 
ful field for each of our many Cassandras, who will 
do us the service of broadly contrasting the strong 
points of the German cities with the defects and 
weaknesses of our own. Let them point out to us 
our ports, which have grown up anyhow, our towns, 
in which factory and railway, slum and suburb, are 
separated by mere accidents of personal ownerships, 



216 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

or crushed together by mere planless growth, and 
which we then patch and cobble as best we may, and 
at infinite cost and labour, and with no organic 
unity, no adequate utility, and no beauty when done. 
Whereas, at Diisseldorf or Frankfort, we recall the 
new port skilfully planned throughout, with its 
specialised havens, its depots and factory quarters, 
its railway and power-station, all complete ; and with 
these the new town-quarter, not left as with us to 
chance planning and building with its monotonous 
mean streets, but with boulevards and gardens, even 
its parkway beyond these to the city forest. How 
shall we persuade the engineers of the London or 
other Dock Commission that it may even be good 
business thus to provide for their dockers' health 
and pleasure? 

So important is this question that we shall venture 
to express it further. Compare, then, this Frankfort 
plan with the vastest dock scheme as yet before the 
world, and for the extension of the greatest port of 
its history the 14,000,000 scheme for the extension 
of the London Dock System, as adopted by Lord 
Devonport and his colleagues about 1910-11 ; and of 
which we have since been accustomed regularly to 
hang a reproduction in the Cities and Town Planning 
Exhibition wherever it goes, side by side with its 
smaller contemporary of Frankfort, this being chosen 
as an illustration of the best port and associated 
town planning up to date and for moderate outlay 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 217 

(some 2,000,000). Its companion is shown not only 
as the biggest and costliest up to date, nor even, as 
we venture to suspect, as probably presenting, alike in 
proportion to outlay and in principle, less of engineer- 
ing design and of industrial economy than elsewhere 
heretofore ; since these are naturally questions for 
engineers, for merchants and manufacturers, and for 
the financiers who dominate them all. The prime 
interest for a Town Planning Exhibition of this 
stupendous scheme lies in its naive and total ignoring 
of the human element of docking, in its overlooking 
not only of the essential map of London, that of 
Mr Booth's great survey, but with it of the main, 
basal, social, economic, and therefore also engineering 
fact, that such great new docks be they good, bad, 
or merely indifferent, and whatever their economies 
in working will still require a vast increase of 
dockers, whose adequate proximity, whose health and 
other conditions are as fundamental to the working 
efficiency of the docks themselves as can be this to 
their financial returns to all concerned. 

Thanks partly to the efforts of this small exhibition 
(but increasingly also to more vigorous forms of 
exposure), the promise and potency of these London 
Dock plans, as at present approved, towards increasing 
the congestion and intensifying the slumdom of dock- 
land, and this to a degree unprecedented in paleo- 
technic civilisation, are becoming realised ; presumably 
also the corresponding exacerbation of those recurrent 
labour troubles of which London Docks afford so 



218 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

many tragic and costly instances instances which 
their surrounding conditions and design, working 
and management, so largely and so lucidly explain. 
Conversely, the no less great possibilities, not only 
indirect, as civic and social, but direct, as industrial 
and financial, in short in every way economic of a 
reconsidered scheme on modern lines are becoming 
manifest. That is, of such an effective reyisal of them 
as would be a matter of course in Germany, by a 
co-operation of engineers and town planners, at once 
acquainted with the best modern solutions and with 
local needs, and with needful skill and good-will to 
deal with them. 

Viewed in its larger aspects, the problem is thus no 
less than that of the whole reorganisation of East 
London. It extends even beyond ; for its efficiency 
and prosperity of course mean much for the City and 
for Greater London. This dock scheme, moreover, 
is a central example as yet for worse, but if revised 
for better to all the maritime cities of our island, of 
the empire, and even beyond. Yet even the narrowest 
view, that of immediate dock-working and its fore- 
casts, this needed reconsideration must be seen to 
justify itself. Hence such appeals as those of the 
Garden Cities and Town Planning Association cannot 
surely much longer be ignored by the Dock Authorities? 
If they are, the questions must surely before long be 
asked, and that more urgently, of and by higher 
authorities ; else surely docker and town planner may 
fairly ask, what is the use to us of the L.C,C. or even 



GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 

of Parliament and its responsible ministers ? But in 
hope that these last questions will be unnecessary, we 
may pass on to other matters. 

So enough of docks ; let us pass now (as doubtless 
do at times many of the very dock directors we have 
been criticising) to towns of the opposite type, those 
avowedly for health and pleasure. Be they large like 
Wiesbaden, or small like Homburg, we find no less 
comprehensive unity of design, no less civic boldness 
in realisation. Pleasant gardens and palatial Kursaal, 
gentle promenades and spacious forest-drives and 
rambles, are all combined into a pleasing and varied 
whole, which retain the visitor till he feels at home, 
and thus attract him to return, and to spread its fame 
wherever he goes. Compare with all this our poor 
watering-places and health resorts, each and all more 
or less bungled and vulgarised, too often from hideous 
railway station and mingled mean and garish streets 
to spoiled sea-front or defiled woodland. True, we 
have some better examples ; but no first-rate ones : 
for amid the many recent endeavours of our watering- 
places to improve their attractiveness, where shall we 
find any serious or sustained example of the collabora- 
tion of town planner, park and garden designer, and 
gardener with architect, sculptor, and craftsman ? 
True, the joint municipal and railway bill-sticker now 
promises us all this ; so the communities concerned 
must soon see to a more adequate performance. 
Even their beginnings of this are found to pay : why 
not go further ? 



220 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

German town planning, as we have seen, has its 
eminent qualities, its manifest dangers and defects 
also ; but enough here in conclusion to repeat and 
emphasise the general impression at its best. It is 
that of a growing association of civic and social action 
with architectural and artistic effort also in unison, 
and these to a degree lacking in our British towns, 
or lapsed even where in past time it has existed. Our 
own Arts and Crafts movement insisted upon the 
needful relations of art to the community-life from 
which it arises, which it expresses, and with which it 
declines. Here, however, German cities are actively 
entering upon this new advance of city life and 
creative art together : and now also is our own oppor- 
tunity. We have to live in towns : and, on the 
whole, with all respect to Garden Cities and Garden 
Suburbs, we have to make the best we can of the 
existing ones. Here, then, is a point for the reader, 
an outlet for his energies. He knows how the im- 
provement of towns and cities on their administra- 
tive and utilitarian side has already notably advanced, 
and is advancing, that more general social idealism 
for which these hope and strive, even under the 
existing rules of the municipal game. Hence in 
each city, amid the incipient outburst of town 
planning and city improvement schemes, good, bad 
and indifferent, with corresponding formation of civic 
betterment associations also, of all kinds and qualities, 
there is likewise opening everywhere a new field for 
the artist, a new audience for the socialises Each 






GEllMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 

of us may say he is already busy enough with his 
own work : but such a ramble as ours through German 
cities will soon convince him that for our poor 
muddled towns there must also be ways of increasing 
their efficiency and his own together, of bringing civic 
survey and forethought towards material realisation, 
and this within the reasonably near future. There 
is a time to dream and tell of Utopia ; but has not 
this been going on long enough ? Here in our 
present phase of industrial and municipal develop- 
ment the opportunity is arising for saying, " Here 
or nowhere is our America" -our Eutopia in 
some measure realised upon earth, our new age at 
least begun. Zionic hopes and Fabian policies are 
neither of them to be despised ; yet surely there is 
place in the world for Promethean efforts, for 
Herculean labours also, and all these localised as of 
old. May not individuals supply the needful fire, 
and groups the needful strength ? The Augean 
stable, the deadly marsh, the ever-renewing hydra- 
hended evils are not far to seek. 



CHAPTER XI 

HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING IN RECENT PROGRESS 

Eutopia in progress : developments of recent years in England, 
Germany, etc. 

Metropolitan improvements, of Athens, and next of Dublin. Rise 
of municipal life and leaders. Constructive progress in British cities 
and in American ones, yet limitations persistent. The housing situa- 
tion in Canada and Australia. 

Phases of progress in India. 

Home politics turning towards city betterment : corresponding call 
for fuller knowledge, and its diffusion. 

EUTOPIA, Limited, is thus becoming established, both 
as regards housing and town planning : and though we 
cannot here attempt to report on these great move- 
ments, for which a whole volume would be needed 
(one, happily, soon out of date), some estimate of 
progress in these leading directions may be outlined. 

First of all, then, let us once more recognise that 
along with the Housing movement, and beyond its 
main phases, which were sketched out in Chapter VII., 
we have fairly entered upon a larger and more com- 
prehensive recovery of town planning : as also that 
for this impulse we peculiarly owe gratitude to the 
example of Germany, whose greater civic traditions 
and whose later and far less acute paleotechnic develop- 
ments, along with more adequate education technical, 

222 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 223 

scientific, and cultural alike have on the whole been 
making her transition to the higher neotechnic order 
of industry more speedy, natural, and effective than it 
is as yet in the English-speaking world. Such warm 
appreciations and frank admissions have not in the 
least prevented us from recognising, as in Chaps. IX. 
and X., the limitations of German town planning, nor 
from valuing those superiorities of our own cottage 
homes and garden villages and suburbs, which Germans 
are now as frankly visiting and learning from in their 
turn. For it is just in such countries, whose village 
life has so largely suffered from ages and crises of war 
beyond number, that we find, alike from the historic 
and the rural standpoint, a more vivid appreciation 
than we have ourselves of this present renascence 
and readaptation of the English village, since this 
in its way is often, thanks to its long-continued peace, 
the most beautiful the world can show. Here in this 
renewal, in fact, is the foremost recent advance of 
England, and the best gift to civilisation she is at 
present offering ; one peculiarly helpful, encouraging, 
and suggestive alike to war-beaten countries like 
most Continental ones, like Scotland and Ireland un- 
happily also, as well as towards amending the paleo- 
technic confusion of old and new world alike. 

Hence once more returning to Garden Suburbs, and 
this time reviewing their progress in the first three 
years after the passage of Mr Burns's Act, their progress 
has been going on encouragingly as compared with 
earlier years of the movement, though still slowly 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 225 

in view of the populations to be reached. As the 
report for the Garden Cities Association for 1913 
conveniently sums up for us, in that year some 
twenty-five new schemes were set on foot, covering 
1500 acres with new buildings, with maximum of 
twelve houses per acre, thus providing in that year 
for an ultimate population of 90,000. The total area 
now comprised in the schemes is over 15,000 acres, 
planned to house some 300,000 people. The same 
area, developed in the ordinary style, would have a 
population of between one and a half and three 
millions. These schemes are on various scales of 
density, the 4500 acres at Letchworth providing for 
only 35,000, practically the same as for Hampstead 
with its 700 acres. The total population of the estates 
at present is 11,000 in 4500 houses. 2500 acres are 
fully built. Upon land and houses about three and a 
half millions have been spent, co-partnership societies 
accounting for about a million of this. Every 
company started last year has been registered under 
the Acts necessary to obtain Government loans at 
3J per cent. 

Although, as we have seen in a previous chapter 
(VI.), neither Scottish towns nor villages have yet 
been contributing much in the way of positive 
example, a Royal Commission on Housing (1913-14) 
has ranged over the country as well as the towns ; 
and from its evidence, necessarily largely of a kind to 
stagger civilisation, a correspondingly drastic Report 

cannot be wondered at. 

15 



226 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Much disappointment has been felt by the long 
delay at Rosyth not without official obscurantism, 
and of the time-honoured tenacious standard of the 
Admiralty behind it where the one apparently 
assured new town of these islands has been put off 
year after year, with corresponding injury to the 
neighbouring burghs, and delay of what should 
already have been a great national example. With 
1914, however, this state of delay has ended, and a 
fair beginning has been assured with 1915. 

In Ireland the agricultural progress of the last half- 
generation has found a notable expression of recent 
years, in a large measure of provision of dwellings 
for agricultural labourers, some 40,000 or more by the 
beginning of 1914. 

In Germany garden-city estates are of late being 
developed, some ten or thereby up to 1912. In 
Ulm the combination of great municipal enterprise 
in land purchase, with corresponding regulation of 
town extension on garden- suburb lines, and exclusion 
of land-speculators accordingly, is rapidly making this 
one of the most well-developed of modern cities. 
For here we may set out below the great cathedral 
spire which is the city's historic centre, ramble out- 
wards in well-nigh every direction through surviving 
medieval and renaissance beauty, and thence pass 
onwards into the growing area of modern town plan- 
ning, without finding those zones of more or less paleo- 
technic character with which we are so familiar. Such 
a city must thus rapidly overtake those of earlier and 






HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 227 

ruder modern development ; and may well suggest 
the future of our own old-fashioned cities, like York, 
for instance, especially as the advancing methods of 
electric power-transmission from not too distant 
collieries are borne in mind. In fact, is it not possible, 
even probable, that in course of the transition from 
paleotechnic industries to neotechnic civilisation, not 
a few such changes of relative importance may take 
place between town and town? 

Similar beginnings are in progress in other 
European countries ; not only in France, Italy, 
Hungary, and Sweden, countries all accessible to 
English ideas and initiatives, but upon a larger scale 
at several points in Spain ; where industrial and 
reconstructive movements have rapidly been growing, 
since the loss of the last provinces of her colonial 
empire turned public attention to the needs and 
possibilities of internal development. 

Most impressive, however, of all appeals to the 
civic; imagination, since deliberately renewing the 
central and initiative city of the cultural past of 
Occidental civilisation, is the present replanning of 
Athens ; and it is likewise no small evidence of the 
advance of town planning in this country, that the 
designs chosen for this magnificent work should be 
from the not previously very Hellenic atmosphere of 
Lancaston by Mr T. H. Mawson, one of our most 
effective garden designers and writers, and prepared 
through large town-planning schemes in Canada and 



228 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

elsewhere for this highest of town-planning oppor- 
tunities. The wide bearing of this particular scheme, 
corresponding as it does with the rise of Greece, after 
her Turkish and Bulgarian campaigns, to a larger 
position in the near Eastern world, and to her still 
unsatisfied ambition of appeal to the Greek race, are 
manifest enough ; while for us Westerns the question 
arises may she not once more, as of old, have some- 
thing to teach us ? There certainly is one lesson to 
begin with. A worthy metropolitan city has always 
been realised as a main national or imperial asset ; 
and sometimes also, as in Athens of old and again 
to-day (and of course supremely in the case of 
Jerusalem), as a centre of racial unity, and accord- 
ingly of spiritual appeal, in ways far exceeding 
boundaries and frontiers. 

Where in the world can be the next such ambitious 
civic development ? Not improbably in Dublin. 
There overcrowding and misery have at length be- 
come acutely felt ; yet the memories of her metro- 
politan past have long been renewing into an approach- 
ing future ; and there, moreover, deepest, yet in 
their way most potent of all, there lie the tradition 
and pride of an ancient culture second only to that 
of Hellas, and more directly and deeply continuous 
with it than we realise in lands which have under- 
gone the Roman influence, and thence had it more or 
less effaced or transformed by the barbarian invasions. 

In the present endeavour towards the replanning 
of Dublin, which has lately been made the subject 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 229 

of an open competition by the generous initiative of 
the Earl of Aberdeen, as in the preliminary Civic 
Exhibition promoted by his no less public-spirited 
consort, there has been from the first the same set of 
motives as in Athens. It will be said, and so far 
truly, that this coincidence has been for the most 
part unconscious ; but so much the better. The 
interest of Dublin as a reviving metropolis is not to 
Ireland only, nor even to the sister cities of Great 
Britain, much though these stand to gain, both 
commercially and culturally, by the rise of her wealth 
and influence : it appeals to the Irish race, through- 
out the United States as throughout the Empire ; 
and thus, little though hotly opposed partisans may 
as yet see it, it will renew a too long interrupted 
bond for the whole English-speaking and Anglo- 
Celtic world, as well as for the sea-divided kindred 
of the Gael. 

Returning thus by way of Dublin to home cities 
generally there are great elements of hope. A better 
attitude in town and county councils has been arising. 
Old councillors are improving or retiring ; and new 
ones are coming in who may be as yet immature, and 
only semi-articulate, but who are more awake to 
public and civic interests, to the condition of the 
people, and their need of improved housing. There 
are also signs that the body of their constituents in 
the working-class may soon be interesting themselves 
in these problems, and this for their own sake ; and 
they even offer a fresh approach to that rise of money- 



230 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

wages on which labour agitation and endeavour have 
too predominantly specialised. The L.C.C. and 
leading municipalities throughout the country have, 
for a good many years past, been increasingly leavened 
by a growing minority of such councillors. Effective 
local and civic leadership began, even a generation 
ago, to appear. Thus, though estimates necessarily 
differ as to the political careers of Mr Chamberlain 
or of Lord Rosebery, all parties have agreed in 
appreciating the first as a great and constructive 
mayor of Birmingham, and in praising the record of 
the latter as the first chairman of the L.C.C. Yet 
the most eminent and effective civic career of our 
time (we trust in the future typical, not exceptional 
as heretofore) has been that of a studious and 
strenuous Battersea engineer, who from lifelong local 
experience in his borough and larger responsibility 
for London, has risen to general civic legislation, as 
ruler over many cities. Mr Burns's Housing and 
Town Planning Act of 1910, and his vigilant ad- 
ministration of it during its initiative years, have at 
length placed both these movements upon a new 
level of effective progress, and of public interest 
accordingly. The municipalities are thus aroused and 
stimulated. Through the establishment of a Town- 
Planning Committee in each Corporation, a vast new 
field of usefulness is being opened for their constructive 
minds and efforts ; and though these members and 
staff are still for the most part but serving their 
apprenticeship, often late in life, in a new and complex 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 

art. their work is proceeding apace, and with many 
elements of promise. In fact, a new spirit is abroad 
in our towns, both in inquiry and in endeavour. 

It is beyond us here to particularise adequately, 
and it may seem invidious to select : enough here if 
we merely cite as examples of how our cities are 
entering on a constructive phase (1) the circular 
road system of Liverpool ; (2) the large town-planning 
schemes which are following upon the initial success 
of Harborne Garden Suburb with the recent extension 
of the municipal boundaries of Birmingham ; and, as 
greatest, (3) that immense endeavour towards co- 
ordination of the increasing labyrinth and ever- 
complicating maze of Greater London, for which 
Mr Burns has shepherded its innumerable local 
authorities, along with the L.C.C., to co-adjust their 
town-planning schemes, and needed roads, both radial 
and circumferential. The long-delayed town plan of 
London, and this at its vastest, is thus fairly in course 
of preparation, and it will be in broadly approximate 
draft before the new council-house is ready to receive 
it. The associated problems are all now coming up, 
as of open spaces on one hand, of railway development 
upon another. Here again it is encouraging to note 
that the Northern Junction Railway was in 1913 
repulsed in four months' fight from drawing a reckless 
and widely destructive trench through the extending 
Hampstead Garden Suburb, and with further damage 
upon some of the best districts in North and West 
Lo ndon. Railway development is of course necessary ; 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

but the two generations are now ending in which 
ignorant directors and ruthless engineers, with scarce 
an idea of town planning among them, have been 
overriding the vital interests of cities, and with them 
even their own. The railway system is no longer 
above the community, even in houses of parliament 
so largely dominated by railway interests as have 
been ours. Here surely is a message of hope to sister 
American cities, where Juggernaut still drives his 
cars through the streets ! 

American cities, as we have already recognised, are 
actively entering upon an era of civic progress ; and 
the transition from abstract and barren politics to con- 
crete and constructive civics has nowhere more clearly 
begun. Of American city planning a crowded chapter 
might here be written, and followed by others on the 
improvement of smaller towns, even of villages ; and 
on rural development accordingly, culminating in that 
conservation of national resources which is now at 
many points being assured. Of great designers like 
the Olmsteds and their best pupils, of their con- 
temporaries and rivals of this generation, as of the 
city development commissions and improvement 
trusts which have given them scope and means, it 
would be unpardonable, even in a general sketch like 
the present, to omit cordial appreciation ; and this 
not only of their actual work, but of its educative 
influence upon the Old World. From Olmsted's 
charming garden suburb of Brookline, which is the 
very jewel of Greater Boston, to the monumental 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 



233 



magnificence of renewing Washington, we would fain 
reproduce plans and give due account, and similarly 
from Mr Burnham's imposing and comprehensive 
schemes for Chicago, as from Mr John Nolen's ably 
conceived schemes of " Replanning of Smaller Cities." 




CF.NERAl. PLAN 
KliMl'DKUM : < >F HO \\OIU: 



Fid. 42. Parks and parkway girdle tor a small American city: Roanoke. 

Of nature reserves, great and small, of noble parks 
and city park-rings, of parkways and boulevards, of 
people's gardens and children's playgrounds, much 
also should be shown and said. For examples of 
civic magnificence choice would be not a little 
embarrassing, since we must consider not only the 
great; and old world -cities, like Boston and New 
York, but provincial capitals, from Albany westwards 
and southwards ; while even what in this old country 



234 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

would seem but minor towns are planning to have 
" civic centres " of the best. Universities alone would 
overflow the most compact of chapters with an out- 
line bare at best ; and so on. In summary, then, we 
here abandon all attempt at summary : an entire 
volume, setting forth the " Civic Examples of 
America," is what is needed ; and this, it is to be 
hoped, some European city student and town planner 
may before long supply. 

It is thus in no ungenerous spirit, but an altogether 
friendly one, that we reluctantly devote the little space 
which remains to the less favourable side of American 
progress. Yet it would be altogether unduly opti- 
mistic were we here to forget, as various groups of 
city improvers seem to do somewhat too readily, that 
neither town-halls nor civic centres, parks nor park- 
ways beautiful, desirable, necessary, even urgent 
though these undoubtedly are can abate the yet 
greater necessity and beauty, desirability and urgency 
of providing, more and more efficiently, for the homes 
of the people ; since these in great American towns, 
as in industrial England, are for the most part still 
but on a too paleotechnic level. But since it has 
been here impossible to do justice to the qualities of 
American towns, it is needful to leave to American 
writers the task of describing their defects. Mr 
Stead's well-intentioned criticisms of Chicago gave 
deep offence ; and this without his going fully into 
those defects of its housing and town planning which 
are at once a cause and consequence of social evils, 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 

and act and react in vicious circles with them, just 
as in great cities of Europe. Enough here if it be 
frankly suggested, that the optimism of progress- 
so long and strongly prevalent in the United 
States, and undeniably of so much more value 
to rapid material developments and to individual 
energies than is the tone of pessimism too common 
in the Old World has yet been having its dis- 
astrous side, blinding the public to that still too 
paleotechnic progress on which we have insisted 
in earlier chapters. Such prolonged optimism has 
had in it a good deal of what biologists call a 
"survival in isolation "- isolation from the older 
France which has meantime outlived the oratoric 
ecstasies of her political revolution, and from that 
older England which since Carlyle's and Ruskin's day 
has been increasingly outliving her orthodox political 
economy, with its mood of self- congratulation upon 
"our unparalleled material progress." 

Ot' American housing, then, the little that can 
here be said, may best be but to give two or three 
references. First, to the pioneering work and works 
of its housing reformers, like Dr Elgin Gould and 
Mr Lawrence Veiller ; of its Settlement workers, of 
whom Jane Addams is but the foremost; of its 
charities organisers, like Dr Devine. Second, to 
the later and rapidly growing literature of City 
Surveys on lines similar to those of Mr Booth's 
London or Marr's Manchester, but with due local 
independence, and upon a more convenient and 



236 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

workable scale, between the copiousness of Booth's 
volumes and the brevity of Marr's. 

The papers of recent Housing conferences, e.g., 
Cincinnati 1913, may also be referred to ; and in 
this last, as an excellent type, at once critical and 
constructive, we may cite the paper on " Garden 
Cities " by Mr George E. Hooker of the Chicago 
City Club, one of the first and most efficient of those 
rare guides of public opinion, in whom citizenship 
and journalism, and each at its best, unite. In this 
connection we may recall Mr Charles Ferguson's 
University Militant, and finally the chapter on 
" Civic Progress in America " in Mr Victor Branford's 
Interpretations and Forecasts, with its vivid insistence 
upon the steps of civic progress, from the paleotechnic 
slogan of " the City Big " to. the nascent neotechnic 
idealisms of " the City Beautiful," " the City Better," 
and "the City at its Best." 

Much though our optimism as to the condition 
of the American (working) people may have been 
shaken down to its British level by periods of 
residence in New York, Chicago, and even Boston 
Settlements, by visits to Pittsburgh or St Louis, to 
Philadelphia or even to monumental Washington, 
hopefulness naturally renews itself in a Britisher 
when he turns to Canada. Surely in these new 
Canadian cities of whose progress we hear so much, 
alike from themselves direct, and in unparalleled 
literature of land and shipping advertisement, as 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 237 

also at the centre of Empire, and even in those 
remotest vales and glens whose sturdiest sons are so 
largely emigrating thitherward there, if anywhere, 
we must look for working homes of real comfort, 
of true prosperity. The prosperous i'arming home- 
stead is indeed fair to see ; and the uplift it expresses 
from British labourer to Canadian yeoman-farmer is 
one of the greatest of social achievements ; the more 
since the destruction of the English yeornan, of the 
Scots cottar, has so long seemed irreparable. No 
wonder, then, that this admirable prospect should 
send a new hope through our working world, and 
bring out its sons by weekly thousands from single 
ports with every spring. But what becomes of those 
after all a great and necessarily ever-increasing 
majority to whom the yeoman's estate and well- 
being and status remain unattainable ? Town life, 
of course, for the most part ; and so far, it may be, 
well : but at what level of town, on what plane of 
progress ? Still too much what they left at home, 
the paleotechnic ; and with its housing, at least at 
danger-points, trebly compressed first by the willing- 
ness of the new colonist to " rough it a bit," so train- 
ing him to accept (and to maintain) conditions of toil 
and even imperfections of sanitation he and his women- 
folk would have complained of at home. Secondly, 
by construction, rendered costly, and this not simply 
by good wages, for that would not essentially delay 
com fort all round but, as so often for housing 
elsewhere, by the high price of building capital, 



238 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

in its competition with other outlets. Thirdly, by 
the contagious frenzy of land and site speculation, 
which seems even to outrun the intensity of that 
mental, moral, and social disease even at its worst 
points in old Europe, but which we in Europe, 
with our innumerable high-dividend-paying Canadian 
Trust Companies are assiduously fomenting and 
exploiting in our turn. As with the United States, 
however, we may best leave the criticism of Canadian 
cities from the housing point of view to others ; in 
this case to the report of the man who most especially 
and completely combines the points of view of the 
experience of the workman, the builder, and the 
civic statesman Mr Henry Vivian, M.P., of whose 
co-partnership achievements we have already spoken 
(pp. 138-9). What, then, is his report ? Compressing 
it as we must, and fairly may do, does it not sub- 
stantially coincide with that to which we came for 
our own cities (Chapter VI.), in their characteristic 
product, tendency, and line of paleotechnic evolu- 
tion as in too many points attaining positive slum- 
dom, at others too largely on the way thither ? 

Australia, with its remoteness, its dreaded desert- 
interior, its patriarchal wealth and pastoralism (not 
without Job-like risks of ruin), has not been attracting 
colonists in multitude, at any rate since its lures of 
gold were eclipsed by yet brighter ones in other lands ; 
and thus labour conditions in towns seem rising 
faster than in those of other new lands, whose con- 
gestion is more continuous and more severe. Yet 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 239 

how far have the political ambitions and constructive 
opportunities of its unprecedentedly successful and 
powerful Australian Labour Party as yet turned to 
the realities of life, as housers and town planners 
understand them ? Are we simply ignorant ; or are 
they, like their analogues at home for the most part, 
still largely playing at the old political game of party 
" outs and ins," in which barristers and financiers are 
everywhere the real experts, as at best occasionally 
scoring amateurs ? From the facts that the British 
Association's 1914 visit to Australia has included 
Town Planning as a prominent feature of its economic 
section's programme, and that a leading Australian, 
as well as British, town-planning organiser and ex- 
ponent, Mr C. C. Reade, with an expert colleague 
from the old country in Mr W. R. Davidge, have 
actively prepared the leading cities for this visit, 
there are good grounds for hoping that Housing and 
Town Planning may soon enter upon a new genera- 
tion of activity in Australian cities, and that not 
contented with Canberra, however monumental a 
new Washington it may become the old lay-out 
of spaciously combined city parks and building 
areas which are the glory and fame of Adelaide, 
may be revived as again an example throughout 
the Commonwealth, and beyond. Again, that 
the natural beauty of Sydney be preserved and 
developed ; and so on throughout other cities, great 
and small. 

For the cities of South Africa from this distance, 



240 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and with the insufficient knowledge such remoteness 
involves, the situation seems broadly similar to that 
of Australia. But in India it is largely different, 
and still more beyond clear estimate from this 
distance. New Delhi in its imperial way can but be 
a greater Canberra ; but the problems of the great 
regional capitals are also coming forward. Bombay, 
with its expanded dock-system has new population- 
growth to plan for : the authorities of Calcutta are 
at present studying the best utilisation of a sub- 
stantial sum of five millions or thereby, obtained by 
the capitalisation of an Improvement Tax (a method 
which may reward study elsewhere) ; and at least 
one able and suggestive scheme for the improvement 
of that great city, not forgetting the abatement of 
its congestion, has already appeared, that of Mr 
Richards' stately volume on The Conditions, Improve- 
ment and Town Planning of the City oj Calcutta 
and contiguous Area, a report by request of the 
Calcutta Improvement Trust. Interest in city con- 
ditions is also apparent in Madras; while to the 
cities of more than one of the feudatory princes, 
Mr Lanchester has of late given a fresh con- 
structive impulse, and this expressed with a wise 
conservatism, a respect for Indian architecture, 
craftsmanship, and ways of life. 

Without entering unduly into imperial politics, it 
may here be recalled that city planning has ever 
been a part of imperial policy. But this is not 
permanently limited to the expression of the powers 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 

and glories of the ruler or the state, as on the whole 
from imperial Rome to modern Paris or Berlin, and 
now from Whitehall to new Delhi. The people, in 
all cities alike, must increasingly ask, with homely 
directness, " Where and when are we to come in ? " 
At home we see the answers beginning to emerge, 
and housing neotechnic instead of paleotechnic as 
one great part of it. But this involves a far more 
neotechnic order of civilisation generally, urban and 
rust ic alike, with bettered agriculture and civil 
engineering ; and further, an urban civilisation far 
more hygienic and more finely skilled, better organ- 
ised in its mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing 
industries, in its commercial and financial order, 
in its education and culture, its administration and 
progress. What if this broad conception of general 
social evolution as from a paleotechnic to a 
neotechnic order of society, through development 
and transformation or replacement of our present 
methods of industrialism, transports, and commerce, 
with corresponding advance of and change in science 
and education, in finance and government correspond- 
ingly be also broadly applicable to the Indian 
Empire as well ? This question would of course lead 
us far, yet in outline it may be simply stated. The 
beginnings of our Indian Empire were as a mercantile 
com pany ; of which the directors and clerks naturally 
evolved into an administration, and their factory 
guards into an army ; so that their transformation a 

couple of generations ago into an imperial adminis- 

16 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

tration and army was in principle natural enough, 
however catastrophic at the moment, and in detail. 
The impartial and non-commercial outlooks of these 
have obvious advantages. Yet as time has gone on 
this simple governmental structure, of traditional 
Civil Service and standing army, has been increasingly 
supplemented. Notably, for instance, by educational 
machinery, and still more in technical directions. 
Hence the railway and the road engineer, the forest 
conservator, even the botanic gardener ; then too the 
geological surveyor, and at length and above all from 
the peasants' point of view, and therefore increasingly 
the statesman's the irrigator, with his substantial 
recovery of the ancient past. The corresponding 
advance of agriculture, comparable not only to the 
renewal of Ireland, but this, in population and in 
area, for whole Irelands by the dozen, is plainly 
approaching; and with this a renewal of education, 
and on lines widely different from that mingled 
bureaucracy of cram, pseudo-classical and pseudo- 
utilitarian, of which the supremacy in India, as at 
home, is happily at length abating. With all these 
constructive changes must naturally come an increas- 
ing well-being, both rustic and urban ; and its ex- 
pression in bettered homes and villages and towns, in 
improving cities, and these from below and within, 
as well as from above and from without. 

Here, then, is the field for a further and fuller 
co-operation of East and West, one richer in mutual 
service than all the interchanges of John Company, 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 

greater and stronger because more constructive than 
any preceding expressions of regional and civic well- 
being, or even of imperial unity, in prosperity and 
peace. 

In every way, then, and throughout the Dominions 
and Empire, as in the United States or at home, 
civic progress is beginning ; while in this, though the 
housing movement be of central importance, it again 
is but part of that general progress which it is our 
essential theme to insist upon from the present 
predominantly paleotechnic civilisation - - variously 
compounded in each place and phase of mechanical, 
militaristic, and monetary factors towards a higher 
neotechnic phase, characterised by finer industries and 
arts, by geotechnic and hygienic endeavour, by rustic 
and urban improvement ; and all involved with a 
corresponding rise of social and individual ideals and 
practice accordingly. , v 

We return thus to our own country. Encourag- 
ing as are all these advances of Housing and Town 
Planning as compared with their earlier years, such 
progress still needs to be greatly accelerated, in view 
of the cities and populations to be reached. It is 
satisfactory to know that many schemes are even now 
before the Local Government Board, and that far 
more are in preparation : but even with all these, and 
the curve of uprise which they indicate, further 
acceleration is needed. Hence aided alike by success- 
ful examples, as of rural housing in Ireland, and by 
bitterness of need, as in the recently realised condition 



244 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

of housing in Dublin the movements of Housing 
and Town Planning begin increasingly to engage the 
attention of Parliament, between times of more 
dramatic or more trivial excitements. These 
associated questions are thus maturing towards 
measures accordingly, and this among the active and 
socially awakening minds in every party. Witness 
the Housing Bill brought forward in 1914 by 
Opposition members (significantly by younger ones), 
and by the corresponding promises of the Government 
not to rest content with criticisms of this in detail, 
but to grapple with its problems before long, and 
comprehensively. We shall not enter here into the 
differences among the great parties ; nor yet simply 
rest content with the substantial measure of agree- 
ment they show : but as we began by broadly and 
generally outlining the great transition from a lower 
to a higher industrial and social economy, so let us 
continue. Hence, after concluding this chapter with 
its sketch of progress as yet attained, we may best 
apply our remaining space to the consideration of the 
educative resources of the movement, its Town 
Planning and Civic Exhibitions especially; and, above 
all, towards outlining these continued advances of 
social inquiry and survey, which are still needed in 
every community, great and small. For without such 
advances of fuller and better diagnosis before treat- 
ment, municipal effort in detail, and parliamentary 
legislation in general, must remain in the immediate 
future too much as they have been in the past far less 



HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 245 

wisely conservative, less progressively liberal, and less 
constructively social and vital than they both ere 
long may be. Can we but gain the needful civic and 
regional knowledge and insight, and the practical sym- 
pathy and corresponding skill which these develop, 
a new advance of our cities will have begun indeed, 
and a new uplift of civilisation may be well-nigh 
assured. 



CHAPTER XII 

TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 

Exhibitions in their origins, medieval, renaissance, and industrial. Initi- 
ative of London and rise of Paris Exhibitions : most important and 
fruitful of the initiatives and outcomes of these has been the Civic 
Exhibition. Examples and advance of this in German cities. 

Retrospect and criticism of London Town Planning Exhibition of 
1910. Rise of Cities and Town Planning Exhibition : its record and 
aims. Outline of its plan at Ghent. 

FIRST a word on exhibitions in general. In the 
Middle Ages each craft-guild had its exhibition of 
literal " master-pieces," contributed by skilled journey- 
men, aspirants to the rank of mastership ; and so it 
seems to have been for a time at the Renaissance, 
with its advance of many arts into a new and brief 
perfection. Picture exhibitions have long been 
pursuing the same purposes of self-expression and 
mastery, beyond their simply commercial one; and 
soon after the clear advent of the Industrial Age, 
general exhibitions began to take form ; in Paris, it is 
said, as early as 1793. A generation later came the 
first proposal of an international exhibition of 
industrial progress. It is worth noting that this 
fitly came from the discoverer of those early imple- 
ments and remains in the caverns of Dordogne which 

246 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 247 

proved to Lyell and his reluctant contemporaries the 
vast antiquity of man ; for M. Boucher de Perthes 
was a true student of the past ; no mere antiquary 
and collector, but a thoughtful inquirer into the pro- 
gressive control by man of his environment, and thus 
interested in all that the advance of his appliances 
might signify in that remote past, or again in his own 
scarcely less marvellously evolving present. Here in 
fact he had reached a true, a central, a continuous 
epic of humanity "Tools and the man I sing!" 
But the period of the Industrial Age, full enough in 
enthusiasm and hope to carry out such a dream into 
deed, could only arrive twenty or more years later, 
when, to the comparatively familiar achievements of 
the steam-engine, of the spinning-jenny and the 
loom, had been added the impressive magic of railway 
and telegraph, as fully renewing the wonders of the 
world. Thus appeared the great International 
Exhibition of 1851, so that its Crystal Palace remains 
to this day, and has been rightly preserved from 
recent danger of destruction, as the monument of not 
only the material uplift, but the spiritual culmination 
of the paleotechnic order at its very highest. After 
this our British manufactures, despite obvious 
elements of superiority, found themselves, however, 
in too many respects distanced by those of more 
incipiently neotechnic peoples and cities hence Paris 
Exhibitions increasingly assumed predominance for 
the next half-century, culminating in 1900. This 
superiority was not a little aided by the intelligent 



248 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

classification and comparison, as museums of industry, 
introduced by their organiser in 1856 and '67, the 
social economist Frederic Le Play, whose various in- 
fluences on sociology and social betterment are alike 
still spreading ; but their super-eminent position was 
assured by the moral and social uplift after 1870-71, 
with its artistic, technical, and scientific productivity, 
which has repeated, and in its own way even sur- 
passed, that of Germany after 1809. General ex- 
hibitions have also been continued in many countries, 
as notably in the United States: witness especially 
the architectural impressiveness of the Chicago 
Exhibition of 1892 towards arousing that concept of 
" the City Beautiful," which has since been working 
wonders ; or, again, the ambitious " Panama Exhibi- 
tion " at San Francisco to commemorate the opening 
of the great canal. 

Looking back over the central series of Paris 
Exhibitions (1878, '89, 1900), we may now ask, What 
was their most significant and fertile exhibit, the real 
clou of each exhibition ? For the first, it seemed the 
Trocadero Palace ; in the next the world-wonder was 
the Eiffel Tower, since sky-scrapers as yet were not ; 
and, for the third, surely the magnificent " Rue des 
Nations," unparalleled union as it was of national 
self-expressions in international amity. After all, the 
highest portent and most enduring influence has 
proved to be the appearance in each exhibition, and 
on an ever-increasing scale, of a " Pavilion of the City 
of Paris/' For here was the most organised of all 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 249 

great modern cities becoming increasingly conscious 
of its own collective life, and striving to express 
and advance this to and through its people by vivid 
and graphic methods of every kind. With this also 
we may take the growing development of a section 
of new type, instituted by Le Play in 1867, that of 
Social Economy and Industrial Welfare. Here, then, 
we had the advent of a new type the Civic Exhibi- 
tion which was henceforth increasingly destined to 
replace the older exhibition of technical appliances 
and details, of products and even masterpieces, as 
yet but aggregated for rivalry or gain, and not yet 
integrated and inter-organised towards social well- 
being and civic use. 

Yet French cities have still remained under the 
crushing inhibition of their over-centralising and 
money-exporting metropolis ; while German cities 
have been in course of unprecedented expansion ; 
hence this fertile idea of the Civic Exhibition has 
since 1900 been finding its main development and 
expression north of the Rhine. Thus Dresden, 
Munich, Berlin, Leipzig, Diisseldorf, and other cities 
have each had its own civic exhibition, and always of 
value and interest, local and comparative, or both. 
And generally with even popular success. True, the 
large " Building Trades' Exhibition " of Leipzig in 
1913 had the extraneous and imperial aid of a battle 
centenary ; but the modest and excellent " Old and 
New Cologne " of the same year not only ran on its 
own merits for six months, but has been repeated for 



250 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

1914, with additional features contributed by the 
" Werkbund," an association answering to our own 
" Arts and Crafts." This, we may here note, under 
the auspices of the new and enlightened Board of 
Trade Exhibitions Department, has at length, in 
Ghent in 1913, removed the paleotechnic reproach 
too frequently associated with our past appearances 
in exhibitions, and won pre-eminence ; pre-eminence 
indeed so frankly and internationally recognised as to 
obtain an unprecedented appreciation and compliment, 
that of invitation to repeat its architecturally arranged 
as well as beautiful display in the galleries of the 
Louvre. In such ways the revolution in exhibitions 
is becoming complete ; for instead of mere individual 
agglomerates, mere heterogeneous products, coarse 
and fine, we have increasingly the conception of civic 
life influencing architecture, and this marshalling 
arts and crafts, and with no small enhancement of 
individual effect and significance accordingly. 

Though the need of Civic Exhibitions 4n British 
towns has for many years past been urged, neither 
the example of Paris nor the influence of group and 
individual endeavours at home could accomplish their 
effective beginning, until at home the movement of 
garden cities and town planning had made itself 
widely felt and with this the example of Germany 
was realised, and the interest in American city im- 
provement also awakened and above all, until the 
wide discussion of Mr Burns's Town Planning Bill, 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 251 

and its successful passage as an Act, gave concrete- 
ness and urgency to the movement. True, the 
Sociological Society had at times since its foundation 
in 1 904, discussed the expediency of promoting a Civic 
and Town Planning Exhibition, and of bringing the 
idea before other societies architectural, geograph- 
ical, statistical, etc. Its representations to the Guild- 
hall Town Planning Conference of 1907 did indeed 
result in the formation of a " Cities Survey Com- 
mittee " among their members ; and soon afterwards 
among its own was formed " a Cities Committee, to 
promote the Survey and Investigation of Cities, and 
the study of Civics," and this " in the first place by 
promoting Civic Exhibitions." Such success as these 
attempts obtained, though real, was chiefly indirect ; 
and this by help of their leading architectural 
members, more than their strictly sociological ones, 
for whom civics is still lacking in canonicity, as no 
longer, since Aristotle, an academic subject. It is, 
moreover, disturbing to the usual alternation of 
approved ^and time-honoured sociological inquiries ; 
as, on one hand, philosophic contemplations of 
Society " in the abstract, or at most of " societies " 
not too concrete ; and, on the other, the discussion of 
anthropological data, sometimes vital enough, but 
generally belonging to societies too primitive to have 
attained the civic stage at all. In 1910, however, an 
effective start of the Exhibition movement was made 
in London. Co-operation was organised between the 
Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal 



252 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Academy ; and leading architects, town planners, 
and active associations came forward, and were 
cordially aided from the Continent and America. 
Thus a large and instructive exhibition was got 
together, and a well-attended Conference was held, 
under the active and encouraging presidency of 
Mr Burns ; the whole resulting not merely in a read- 
able and well-illustrated volume, but thanks to the 
real merit of the exhibition and the value of its dis- 
cussions, aided by a particularly "good press" in 
a marked advance of public opinion and interest 
thenceforward. 

For the main significance and lessons of this 
London Town Planning Exhibition of 1910, the 
writer may here condense his report upon it to the 
Sociological Society ; since its essential criticisms of 
much contemporary town planning remain valid ; 
while its practical suggestion has since been bearing 
fruit. 

This exhibition will be remembered as a date and 
landmark in our social progress. Avowedly only a 
beginning, it expresses a great step beyond traditional 
politics and beyond current sociology also ; to a 
more direct and realistic mode of thought, and to a 
correspondingly more direct and practical form of 
action. For here we have done with arguments 
concerning "the Individual and the State," and we 
know nothing of parties and elections, of votes or 
the demand for them. We have got beyond the 
abstract sociology of the schools Positivist, Socialist, 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 253 

or other with their vague discussion of " Society " 
and its " Members," since we have reached the 
definite conception in which all these schools have 
been lacking that of Cities and Citizens. Thus our 
corporate government, and our individual energies, 
find opening before them no mere remote and 
deputed activities, but a vast yet definite field of 
observation and action ; and these capable of ex- 
pression more vivid, of notation more definite, than 
even speech or writing ; to wit, the surveyor's maps 
and relief models, the architect's plans. Towards this 
extension and renascence of the city, this enlarging 
life-scope of the citizen, our Town Planning Exhibition 
and its Congress appear, as the appropriate educative 
agencies of citizenship. Throughout the length and 
breadth of the land these are beginning to arouse 
city and citizen from their long torpor ; and to 
bring a new concreteness, a fresh possibility of 
research and discovery to the still half-metaphysical 
social sciences ; and they are appealing to the press 
and through it to politicians of all parties, to women 
of all camps. 

Such an exhibition should be visited and studied 
by every responsible and thinking citizen ; yet not 
uncritically. An almost unreserved welcome may 
indeed be given to the plans and projects of garden 
suburbs and garden villages ; as notably also to 
various specific plans and researches, such as those 
of hygienic orientation, i.e. of buildings to light, 
houses to sunshine. More open to criticism are the 



254 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

various designs for the development and reorganisa- 
tion of great cities : Paris, Berlin, Chicago especially. 
For under the dark austereness of some designs or 
the meretricious beauty of others, one main impression 
appears. All these agree far too much in expressing 
too little but the imperial, the Cgesarist, type of city ; 
which is essentially the same whether it be imitated 
from the Paris of Louis XIV. or of Napoleon I., or 
from the correspondingly magnificent designs of 
Washington : it is not really original or recent. The 
strategic boulevards of Haussmann and Napoleon III., 
the pompous perspectives and parade-grounds of 
Berlin, reappear with too little of essential change 
of spirit in the proposed transformation of Chicago. 
We may so far call a Garden Suburb a " Demopolis " ; 
but do not these new cities threaten one and all to 
become each a new " Tyrannopolis," and this however 
benevolent in intention or republican in name or 
design : for, despite all their magnificence of public 
buildings, each is still too much without a true Acro- 
polis. The great city is not that which shows the 
palace of government at the origin and climax of 
every radiating avenue : the true city small or great, 
whatever its style of architecture or plan, be this like 
Rothenburg or like Florence is that of a burgher 
people, governing themselves from their own town- 
hall and yet expressing also the spiritual ideals which 
govern their lives, as once in ancient acropolis or 
again in medieval church or cathedral : and we 
cannot feel that the designers of any of these great 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 255 

plans have as yet sought new forms for the ideals 
which life is ever seeking. 

In our present phase, town-planning schemes are 
apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One 
is all for communications, another for industrial 
developments. Others are more healthily domestic 
in character, with provision for parks and gardens ; 
even, by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime 
necessity of civic survival : but too many reiterate 
that pompous imperial art, which has changed so 
little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past 
to that of their representatives in the present. Such 
plans mingle both exaggerations and omissions with 
their efficiency: in their too exclusive devotion to 
material interests they dramatically present the very 
converse of those old Spanish and Spanish- American 
cities, which seem almost composed of churches and 
monasteries. 

To avoid such exaggeration, yet incompleteness, 
what is the remedy ? Clearly it awaits the advance 
of our incipient study of cities. For each and every 
city we need a systematic survey, of its development 
and origins, its history and its present. This survey 
is required not merely for material buildings, but 
also for the city's life and its institutions, for of these 
the builded city is but the external shell. Hence the 
suggestiveness of the partial survey of Edinburgh, one 
of the most typical of cities, especially as rearranged in 
completer form in later exhibitions, with surveys of 
other cities, great and small, British and Continental. 



256 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Here is a vast field of social inquiry, inviting the 
co-operation of specialists of all kinds ; on the one 
side this should be organised by scientific societies, 
and above all the Sociological, next doubtless by 
schools and universities ; but as soon as may be it 
should be undertaken by the citizens themselves, 
aided by their municipal representatives and officials, 
and housed by their museums and libraries. We 
have already a Geological Survey, and are beginning 
those of Agricultural Development and Forestry ; 
but yet more urgent and more vital is the need of 
City Surveys. These are at once the material and 
the starting-point for the Civic and Town Planning 
Exhibition, which will soon become as familiar an 
incident of the city's life as is at present its exhibition 
of paintings. 

Organisers and students of this exhibition could 
not but feel that its rapidly accumulated collections, 
despite their value and suggestiveness, had been at 
once too heterogeneous and too incomplete ; and the 
more orderly endeavour above suggested was resolved 
upon. From the " Survey of Edinburgh," for many 
years in progress at the Outlook Tower, a selection 
had been made and developmentally arranged ; so 
that here, more than elsewhere before, the essential 
conditions and phases of a city's historic past were 
shown as determining its qualities and defects in the 
present. Past and present were also shown as pre- 
senting the problems of the city's opening future, 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 257 

and as conditioning their treatment also. This 
exhibit was therefore felt to present a needed sug- 
gestion, and even nucleus for a further exhibition of 
smaller but more typical and systematic character. 
Hence, with the help of a small committee, repre- 
sentative both of town-planning practice and of 
civic and sociological studies, the new " Cities and 
Town Planning Exhibition" took form at Crosby 
Hall during the following winter, and was launched 
with a vigorous appeal by Mr Burns, as its president, for 
education on the university level in town planning 
and in civics together ; and a recommendation of the 
exhibition as an itinerant agency to London boroughs 
and other cities. 

The principle of this new exhibition was no longer 
simply that of seeking and accepting examples of 
good contemporary work as it comes, important 
though this always must be. It involved an ordered 
design ; that of presenting a type-selection of housing 
and town-planning schemes of suggestive character 
towards city development ; and further of working 
towards the comparative presentment and study of 
the evolution of cities historic, actual, and possible. 
Of this great process, the architecture of a city is 
but the changing expression, and its plan but the 
record, say rather the palimpsest. Hence this new 
exhibition was on one hand greatly reduced in scale, 
yet on the other as greatly increased in complexity. 
From the first it has continued the sociological and 

civic inquiries which had underlain its beginnings in 

17 



258 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Edinburgh, and of which some of the methods and 
results had been outlined in papers at the Sociological 
Society, etc., in previous years, and which had also 
been in progress for some time in beginnings of a 
" Civics Laboratory," temporarily housed at the Uni- 
versity of London. 

The exhibition was next invited by the Corpora- 
tion of Edinburgh, to whom the extensive galleries 
of the Royal Scottish Academy were granted for the 
purpose. The exhibition was opened by Lord Pent- 
land, then Minister for Scotland, and by the Lord 
Provost, each delivering an address. Success far ex- 
ceeded anticipation. It was visited during its three 
weeks by 17,000 persons, including workmen in the 
evenings and school-classes in the forenoons. Thence 
it was invited to Dublin, as part of a general exhi- 
bition organised by the Women's Health Association 
of Ireland, from which it went to Belfast to co- 
operate with the Sanitary Association's meeting, 
under the auspices of the Corporation. Through the 
active interest of the Viceroy and of the Countess of 
Aberdeen, who had also opened and aided these 
exhibitions, a further small exhibition was held at 
Dublin, in conjunction with the meeting of the 
Institute of Public Health, at Trinity College. This 
exhibition was devoted to initiating the survey of 
Dublin and of Irish towns, and to examples bearing 
on their possible improvement. The Housing and 
Town Planning Association of Ireland was here con- 
stituted, and has since entered upon an active career ; 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 259 

while the Irish National Museum, first among great 
public collections, initiated a Department of Cities 
and Town Planning. 

With further growth the exhibition formed the 
chief element of the " Exposition des Villes," which 
was a feature of the Ghent International Exhibition 
of 1913 ; and in conjunction with which was held the 
first international " Congres des Villes," with its 
members drawn from many cities Aberdeen to 
Bucharest, Stockholm to Naples, indeed from San 
Francisco to Calcutta, and which was of interest in 
both its sections, of Town Planning, and of City Life 
and Administration. 

At this stage we may set forth the scheme and 
aims of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition 
as it appeared in more developed (though still too 
incomplete) form at Ghent in 1913, and state these 
essentially as they were presented to the members 
of the Congress of Cities, and at times to later groups 
of visitors. 

Let the reader think of this big International 
Exhibition as in an historic city anxious to express 
and reaffirm itself, and this in various ways. First 
as the provincial capital it has always been, and also 
the regional capital of the Flemish population of 
Belgium, in contradistinction to Brussels as the Wallon 
and French-speaking culture-capital ; and further, as 
the world-city it long was for in the Middle Ages, 
and at the beginning of the Renaissance, it was largely 
in advance of London and Paris alike, as Charles V.'s 



260 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

famous boast " Je mettrais tout Paris dans mon 
Gand " still reminds an incredulous modern world. 
It was thus a natural and fitting place for civic sociol- 
ogists to be called on (or at any rate allowed) to 
make a Congress of Cities which claims to be the 
world's first International one and with these, a 
Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, the beginnings 
of a Summer School of Civics and Citizenship, and 
all amid civic festivals, old and new. Nor was the 
movement inspiring the exhibition solely one of civic 
and regional patriotism. Nationally, it represented 
the post-Leopoldian regime, determined to purify the 
national and civic life from the defects and vices of 
the past reign ; and, internationally, a keen conscious- 
ness of the immense importance and growing signifi- 
cance of Belgium as a Key-stone State, whose very 
material and military weakness, in the midst of great 
armed Powers, gives her an advantage of common 
appeal to them all an appeal impossible to any one 
of these, through their respective jealousies. 

Here, then, was the situation one eminently 
favourable for civics, as well as suitable for town 
planning ; and thus befitting our united " Cities and 
Town Planning Exhibition " to the full. 

A disadvantage of the town-planning movement, 
as yet, is that people think it merely or mainly 
suburban, and architectural at best. But its needed 
renewal of home life and home conditions throughout 
the industrial world is (and will be) delayed our 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 261 

admirable, but comparatively few, garden suburbs 
and occasional central improvements notwithstanding 
until the larger civic movement, now plainly 
nascent, and in well-nigh every land, has gathered 
strength, and become more clearly intelligible and 
purposive throughout the world. 

That which at present makes the delay and 
difficulty of the civic movement will become its 
strength and appeal in the long run. For at present 
the historian is in the library, in the museum, or the 
university in the past anyhow. The builder and 
architect are in the active present, but in the present 
too much alone. The thinker is too often a dreamer, 
occupied with the future indeed, but a future which 
to others seems too remote for practical purposes. 
But a Congress of Cities, a Cities and Town Planning j 
Exhibition, stand for utilising all three types of man and \ 
mind. These too seldom meet, and therefore shrink 
from each other ; but such programmes reconcile and 
bring together not a few of the best of them. Hence, 
when each of our previous exhibitions has closed, 
after its two or three weeks in any great city, it has 
been amid a civic atmosphere notably modified in 
this way. The antiquarian lover of his city's Past, 
whose treasures we have brought before his fellow- 
citizens, admits an awakening to the Present, and 
to this as an opening Future. So too the " practical 
man," hitherto absorbed in the present, confesses he 
has come to see more of his city's roots in the past, 
of liis responsibilities to his successors. Above all, 



262 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the exhibition helps some of the best minds of each 
city to distinguish, in the past, its Heritage (respect 
for which makes the Conservative at his moral best) 
from its Burden (revolt from which makes the Radical 
and the Revolutionary at his moral best). It thus 
does something towards helping both parties in their 
quest of a social policy. Of all this our exhibits of 
old towns, like Edinburgh and Chelsea, with old 
buildings conserved and yet renewed to vital uses, 
are a beginning and a symbol. 

In such ways, too, our exhibition at times even 
reaches the " utopist " and the " crank," for it 
suggests applying the idealism of the one, the in- 
ventive energy of the other, to the needs of the 
present ; and these also stir up the " practical man," 
who does not wish to be left behind, to needs and 
opportunities. 

In each city the Town Planning Exhibition has 
effected more or less of this education of public opinion, 
and towards practical results. Sometimes this im- 
pulse is a diffused one, as in Edinburgh, with results 
manifold, but not easy separately to trace. Sometimes 
there are immediate definite results to which we can 
point, as in Dublin : e.g., formation of a " Cities and 
Town Planning Department" of theNational Museum; 
formation of a " Town Planning Association of 
Ireland " ; with initiatives of improvement for Dublin 
itself, and in 1914 a Civic Exhibition on a larger 
scale than heretofore in the English - speaking 
world, with Competition for a General Town-Plan 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 263 

of Dublin, involving housing and metropolitan 
developments alike. 

After these preliminary explanations it is time to 
come to the exhibition itself, conveniently as it was 
at Ghent ; yet let us first describe its setting within 
what was in various respects one of the best thought- 
out and most vitally executed International Exhibi- 
tions since that of Paris in 1900, and of the most 
distinctly civic character. First the " Exposition de 
la Ville de Paris" deserves a visit, both on its own 
merits and in recognition of its repeated initiative in 
the education of other cities for more than a genera- 
tion past. Next must be mentioned its " Square 
Communal," or " Place des Quatre Grandes Villes," 
with its four noble and characteristic civic palaces, 
erected by Ghent, Antwerp, Liege, and Brussels 
respectively. Each was something of its own Civic 
Museum of the Past and Exhibition of the Present, 
while each, too. had some suggestion for the Future. 
Yet each of these was arranged or unarranged in 
its own way ; and though the general effect was 
rich in artistic and historic interest, even of varied 
practical and social suggestion, any common historic 
or scientific method was lacking to unite the four. 
Thus the study of each was rendered more difficult ; 
and their detailed comparison impossible. In fact, 
while the architecture and the general conception of 
these buildings was a great and encouraging evidence 
of the return of civic life and interest, their lack of 



264 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

unity in detail illustrated the backwardness of civics 
also. Here, however, came in the use of our Cities 
and Town Planning Exhibition. This occupied a 
large gallery beside the Palace of Brussels, and open- 
ing into that of Germany ; it not only brought 
exhibits from many cities, but these better arranged 
from quite a number of distinctive points of view 
the geographer's and the historian's, the statistician's 
as well as the sociologist's. For this exhibition has 
made a beginning, as yet the most clear and definite 
beginning, of the comparative study of cities ; each 
shown like a living being, in constant relation to its 
environment ; and with the advantages of this, its 
limitations too. Like the living being it is, a city 
reacts upon its environment, and in ever-widening 
circles. It may transcend its limitations, here 
economically and there educationally ; or, first in 
thought and next in deed. Hence its character and 
aspect in each age; hence its varied eminence and 
influence accordingly ; until once more it changes, 
with circumstances or with the times, outwardly, 
inwardly, or both. At one time it may conspicuously 
advance, at another show more of arrest and decay, 
poverty and disease, vice and crime. All these are 
modified by war and peace, and these have corre- 
spondingly varied consequences and reactions, now 
of deterioration, or again of renewal. 

In such historic survey there is no neglect of town 
planning ; though in each city we visit the alderman, 
the borough engineer, the anxious reformer too, may 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 265 

sometimes fear this as he enters. Yet when he gives 
a second look, and gets as far as the gallery of Garden 
Suburbs, or that of Central Improvements, he sees 
tha t these are typical ones, naturally arranged ; 
intelligible and helpful accordingly. He comes to 
recognise how the garden suburb and the central 
improvement, in which he may have been interested, 
are related ; and how they gain completeness and 
value from each other, and from his city's past. Each 
garden suburb is not merely an escape from the 
noxious squalor of the merely Industrial Age, or from 
the dreariness of the merely commercial one, to 
healthier individual lives, to brighter family existences : 
these are growing together, before long to form an 
expanding ring, of a healthier city in the future. So 
with the central improvements also : when rightly 
managed these preserve the best traditions of the 
city's past, yet purged of its decay, its active sources 
of continued evils. In some cities, and these often 
the most historic and influential (Rome and Paris 
above all), the central changes have often been too 
violent and too costly, casting out good with evil. 
Other cities too numerous for mention as plainly 
remain conservative in the worst sense, too tolerant 
of evils, ancient and modern, which are blocking the 
light of better days, past and to come. 

Our illustrations of many cities are thus not simply 
for historic interest and interpretation, but for practical 
guidance. Whatever the student of cities can observe 
and interpret, foresee and suggest, the active citizen 



266 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

will not be long to devise and to apply. Yet " we 
learn by living " ; the student of medicine must go to 
the bedside as well as to dissecting-room and study 
before he really understands the working of the human 
frame ; and likewise with the student of cities ; he 
must work in and for his city, were it but to investi- 
gate it more clearly. Still, in medicine and public 
health, it is found best to let diagnosis precede treat- 
ment, and not, as with the would-be " practical man " 
so much hitherto, to adopt the best advertised panacea 
of treatment, before any diagnosis worth the name. 
So it is with cities ; the rival panaceas of their party 
politicians have too long been delaying the surveys 
and diagnoses of the civic sociologist. 

The " Survey of Cities," which we thus reach, is a 
main feature and purpose of our exhibition. This 
survey must take in all aspects, contemporary as well 
as historic. It must be geographic and economic, 
anthropological and historical, demographic and 
eugenic, and so on : above all, it aims towards the 
reunion of all these studies, in terms of social science, 
as " Civics." This youngest branch of science, as yet 
but a little-noticed bud upon the ever- spreading tree 
of knowledge, may before long be recognised as one 
of the most fruitful of all. Its legitimacy and its 
interest are still often unrecognised by the sociologist, 
himself too abstract, or merely anthropological or 
racial, for lack of civics. This too general thinker 
upon human affairs has for some time been seeing 
that between his long favourite extremes of Individual 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 267 

and State, there lies the Family ; but here the City 
is shown to mould the individual (it may be even 
more strongly), and not merely as governing metrop- 
olis to dominate the State. So far we see to-day ; 
hence our civic observations, speculations, and con- 
troversies, our emerging theories in a word, the 
rebirth of sociology, as above all the Science of Cities. 
But as this new or renewed science grows clearer, and 
its results begin to be made plain, as already in some 
measure in our exhibition, it begins to appeal to the 
citizen, and this not only to the thoughtful individual 
here and there, but to thousands. It is worth noting 
that these thousands largely belong to classes hitherto 
not much occupied with municipal politics. The 
appeal of civics seems as yet rather to highly-skilled 
workmen and women, to teachers and artists, and to 
the young rather than to the fixed and old. To the 
conventional and apathetic minds, still too common 
in municipal government and administration, as in 
the larger national machinery, this new fermentation 
of thought seems of little practical importance, since 
not appreciable at the polls, not yet formulated into 
definite programmes. Yet the municipal statesman, 
who is appearing or preparing in many quarters, 
must soon organise and voice this deeply changing 
constituency. 

The citizen already comes into contact with science 
after science : witness Engineering in its many 
brarches, of which but the latest is Electricity; 
witness Public Health, in no few ramifications. 



268 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Education likewise, and at all its levels, from Kinder- 
garten to Polytechnic and University, has been coming 
more and more within the civic view. Economics 
and Law, older interests still, are now changing and 
developing ones. Housing, though an old story, is 
becoming transformed, by conjunction with Town 
Planning. At this stage the City becomes again 
reviewed as a whole, as he who understands a town- 
plan sees all the town as from an aeroplane. All our 
activities industrial and commercial, hygienic and 
educational, legal and political, cultural, and what 
not become seen in relation to one another, as so 
many aspects and analyses of the city's life. To 
make this life more healthy and more effective, the 
unrelated individual activities with which we have 
been too long content are found insufficient ; we need 
fuller co-ordination and harmony of them, like that 
of the instruments of the orchestra, of the actors in 
the drama. We expect this of soldiers in the field, 
of workers and organisers in the factory, of assistants 
and partners in the business. Is it not for lack of this 
orchestration, of this harmonious organisation, upon 
the larger civic stage which our town-plans so clearly 
reveal, that our cities, full of detailed efficiencies of 
many kinds, are still so far from satisfying us as 
collectively efficient ? The time, then, is ripe ; the 
place is every city ; each needs its Civic Survey and 
Exhibition, its Civic Study and Laboratory. Its 
municipal departments have elements of all these ; 
and these increasingly, even consciously witness the 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 269 

four Civic Palaces above referred to. Local conscious- 
ness diffuses and intensifies ; it also widens into com- 
parison of city with city. Thus, in fact, appear the 
methods of a Science of Cities that our cities should 
be individually surveyed, scientifically compared ; as 
their architecture long has been cathedral with 
cathedral, style with style. 

Hence our Cities and Town Planning Exhibition 
(despite incompletenesses on every hand, of which its 
workers are not less conscious than can be their 
most critical visitors) boldly raises the theme of this 
needed Science of Cities. Its surveys are descriptive 
fragments of a " Politography " ; but it is also 
struggling to be interpretative that is, towards 
becoming a true " Polito/ogz/." Of the bearing of 
civics on the social sciences, from economics in 
particular to sociology in general, we attempt some 
graphic outlines. Of its practical bearings and applica- 
tions towards improvements, towards revivified cities, 
suburban or central indications are on our walls. 
It is time briefly to indicate the arrangement of these 
civic galleries, the more since at Ghent it was possible 
to develop this more comprehensively and clearly 
than in previous smaller and less spaciously housed 
exhibitions. 

To present an adequate vision of cities, past, present, 
and future, every city would need its own gallery, 
even palace, to correspond with the above-mentioned 
Belgian four, and these upon an extended scale. 



270 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

We are in the day of small beginnings. Cinemas 
are already showing us the way : the city's reference 
library and museum are seldom without some 
suggestions for us ; and our exhibition gathers as it 
goes. Our galleries of maps and plans, elevations 
and perspectives, pictures and models, are stretching 
towards a kilometre of wall-length, and compressed 
by selection when necessary. Arrangement is no 
easy problem, since we are not simply exhibiting 
town-plans, but aiming towards the indication, in 
part even the elaboration, of a Science of Cities: 
hence the need of selecting types, as clear and illustra- 
tive as may be, amid the mingled wealth and poverty 
of available materials. Our description henceforward 
may be followed upon the accompanying plan 
(page 271). 

First of all, our visitor must be made to feel, and 
this strongly, the profusion and the confusion of the 
subject. Hence our Entrance Hall is hung, like a 
private study or corridor, with a medley of things 
new and old, of pictures, plans, and views, archi- 
tectural or civic, each interesting, but without obvious 
relation or association to any mind except the owner's. 
From this opening presentment of the confused 
beginnings of interest in the subject, it will be noticed 
on the accompanying plan that we may enter the 
gallery of " Modern Civic Administration " without 
further studies on the right hand, as the manner of 
our city fathers has been: hence this has but little 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 271 




CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

systematic arrangement, and is mostly alphabetical 
at best ! What is the usual alternative to this rough 
and ready education of the practical man ? That of 
the educationalist hitherto, and of the architect usually 
also, has been to go forward, into the room of Classic 
Cities. Here, then, are Athens and Rome above all, 
with some illustration of the glory of the one, the 
grandeur of the other ; and next of Hellenic and 
Roman influences throughout history and civilisation, 
as in Constantinople. To these are added indications 
of Babylon, of Jerusalem, and other distinctive and 
influential cities of the past. 

From this classic gallery not only the scholarly 
student and architect, but the public they have so 
long been guiding for good and ill, readily pass on 
into the next gallery, devoted to " Towns and Cities 
of the Renaissance." This has examples of initiative 
historic buildings, and culminating masterpieces of 
later developments and deteriorations. It includes 
indications of the system of education and life, 
especially as architecturally expressed, which these 
have transmitted to the present. 

Among these renaissance cities a few have most 
conspicuously survived in the struggle for existence, 
through innumerable crises of war and changefulness 
of peace. These are now the Great Capitals of 
Europe ; with which are naturally shown cities con- 
spicuously derived from them, at this or that period 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 

e.g., Spanish American (especially from Madrid, at 
the Renaissance), Washington (especially from Paris, 
at the close of the eighteenth century). Hence a 
larger gallery, mainly devoted to the " Great Capitals." 

The exaltation of their day of undisputed pre- 
eminence has here to be brought out ; first through 
the centralisation due to the wars of generations ; 
next through the rise of railways and telegraph 
systems, and the administrative and economic con- 
centrations to which these give rise ; and, yet more 
lately and fully, through that intensification of 
imperial powers and claims of which every great 
European metropolis gives increasing example. How 
such imperial considerations have determined the 
town planning of Berlin in our day, as that of 
Paris by Haussmann a generation before, are but 
salient examples of a process manifest everywhere, 
from Rome or Vienna to Washington, conspicuously 
now in London, witness Kings way and Whitehall. 

Yet when all these supremacies of the Great 
Capitals are expressed, and even emphasised to the 
fullest metropolitan satisfaction, there is another 
process at work, little though the megalopolitan mind 
yet recognises it. Three or two generations ago, and 
less, these great metropolitan cities were alone com- 
pletely organised with all the apparatus and resources 
of the complete civilisation of their time. In some 
respects this is still true. There is only one Louvre, 
one British Museum, one Smithsonian ; just as only 

one War Office for each great country. Still, even 

18 



274 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

war to-day is segregating, decentralising : much more 
has industry been working out its own strategic points, 
though finance may still for a time hesitate to follow 
it. Culture ever refuses to be completely concen- 
trated ; nor can the ultramontane ascendancy of 
Rome be repeated. As even the culture-supremacy 
of Paris was disputed in the Middle Ages by the rise 
of universities in every land, so again the supremacy 
of Paris or Oxford to-day in their own countries ; as 
renewed universities like Montpellier, and new ones 
like Liverpool, are increasingly bearing witness. 

Every considerable city, in short, seeks to complete 
itself. It no longer contentedly accepts provincial 
inferiority ; it finds itself with the means, and in- 
creasingly with the will, to develop its own civilisation 
within and not merely draw it from without. Thus 
Glasgow is not content simply to derive its livelihood 
from its own characteristic activities, while taking its 
ideas from Edinburgh, as in the seventeenth and early 
eighteenth centuries. At the close of that century 
it stamped its utilitarian philosophy and practice upon 
the world by producing the characteristic economic 
thinker in Adam Smith, to match the initiative 
industrial worker in James Watt. And though till 
after the middle of the nineteenth century Glasgow 
took her art from the London Royal Academy or its 
minor Scottish sister at Edinburgh, her awakening to 
the best French painting, her contacts with that of 
the Netherlands have since deeply fertilised her own 
creative sources ; so that to be a simple " member of 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 275 

the Glasgow School" has become a better recom- 
mendation to the world's galleries than to be an 
academician of London and Edinburgh put together. 
Similarly the most vital and progressive university 
of Great Britain, in the last half-generation, has not 
been Cambridge, London, or even Manchester, but 
Liverpool. 

Of any fuller civic awakenings, beyond such after 
all partial developments, examples are naturally few. 
One, as yet little realised, may be cited here, as ex- 
hibited at Ghent : the model (fig. 44) which illustrates 
the rise of Cardiff, from that mere export-centre of 
the South Wales coalfield which London still thinks 
it, to deliberate design as a regional metropolis ; in 
fact, as the fourth national capital of the British Isles ; 
and one determined to be even more complete than 
Edinburgh or Dublin. This ambition is being ex- 
pressed in the creation of a civic centre far surpassing 
that of any other British City ; in fact, in some respects 
more comprehensively (though not as largely or subtly) 
planned as one well known to every town planner, 
that of Nancy, when the southern capital of King 
Augustus of Poland, in his capacity as Duke of 
Lorraine. 

In such ways, without a separation from the Great 
Capitals, their gallery runs straight on to include 
Central Improvements, among Great Cities generally. 

These typical developments are indicated round the 
walls, city by city. It is also needful to show how the 



276 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

various problems common to city life are being met 



; 



niUD's r .vK \u.\\ DI-TAI-IIAVS i~v\iii< W.IKS r!.>ir^F/rJo. 




FIG. 44. Cardiff: Civic Centre well advanced in progress. 

and handled by architects and town planners e.g., 
Railway Stations, from the squalor and muddle still 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 277 

so characteristic of the land of their initiative to the 
well- designed order of later German centres, the 
lucidity and magnificence of the Gare d'Orleans at 
Paris, and the stupendous achievements of St. Louis 
and New York. Here we contrast the crude dock 
design of London with the admirable scheme of 
Frankfort ; and so on for other elements of the 
economic world. So too for education, and from 
kindergartens to universities. Such comparisons 
obviously need as many galleries as we have screens ; 
yet even to begin is something ; with each exhibition 
some progress is made. 

Enough here if the main idea be made clear. The 
cathedral-builders of the thirteenth century viewed 
Notre Dame itself consummate achievement and 
initiative as they saw it to be (the " Paris Exhibition " 
of the year 1200) not as an unapproachable wonder, 
but as something henceforth to be surpassed, and this 
even for minor dioceses and cities, by new world- 
masterpieces. So once more the citizen and the civic 
designer are coming to think and act. No department 
of city life, even in the smallest cities, need be pro- 
vincial, petty, mean, insignificant. To-day with 
gathering knowledge and incipient science, to-morrow 
with arousing imagination and renewing art, a new 
great age of cities is preparing. Our garden suburbs, 
our ( entral improvements are mere beginnings. Thus 
in Ghent, the great town-house, the civic belfry, 
the cathedral, have become consciously the centre of 
an extending spiral, of which the International and 



278 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Civic Exhibition of yesterday were view-points and 
outlooks, and these towards an uplift of civilisation 
civilisation in its old and literal civic sense. 

Despite decentralisation thus preparing with the 
awakening and development of secondary cities and 
regions, the conception of the World-City, which at 
its best has inspired every metropolis worth the name, 
is not exhausted. It even develops; witness the 
project of a " Ville Internationale," devised by Signor 
Andersen (fitly a Scandinavian resident in Rome), 
as nothing short of a Super-Metropolis, in which 
European Civilisation, if not the world's, should 
centre and culminate. The location of such a city is 
wisely left undetermined ; but of the magnitude and 
stimulating value of the conception, there can be 
no denial. That such creations are not "merely 
Utopian," the growing influence of the Hague with 
its World- Areopagus already demonstrates. Similarly 
for such creations as the Temple de la Pensee of 
M. Garas, in whom architect, poet, and philosopher 
combine. 

Hitherto we have travelled along one main line of 
civic study, that to this day most authoritative ; yet 
is it not felt that this series, from old Rome to new, 
too little considers the citizen as a personality, and 
misses much of the personality of his city likewise ? 
A partial answer begins in the adjacent central 
corridor, with its indications of Racial Anthropology, 
which has long been so dear to Teutonic and Anglo- 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 279 

Saxon historians, and is now widely imitated on all 
sides, from Pan- Slavonic to Pan-Keltic. Following 
upon this we come naturally to Civic Demography, 
thence to illustrations of the new-born Eugenic 
movement, and to a selection from recent Child- 
Welfare Exhibitions. Past origins, present facts, 
future developments are thus considered, and for the 
people's life, as well as for their homes. 

Our study of cities will now seem to many as in 
principle complete, however limited and inadequate 
in detail. For here, from the current and dominant 
metropolitan point of view, we have what seems really 
significant for the study of cities. What need of 
minor town-studies? In Berlin Emperor and city 
architect have planned, and Mr Houston Stewart 
Chamberlain's great work has gone through its 
editions : Imperial London already sees in Kingsway 
its second and Colonial Whitehall. What need, then, 
of considering " the provinces " ? Similarly for other 
great countries : of our visitors, few are interested in 
the small cities of their own land, much less in those 
of smaller peoples. Recall how Germany sneers at 
Kriihwinkel, England at Little Pedlington ! 

Yet, in the study of cities, little Jerusalem counts 
for more than Babylon the Great ; and in many ways 
Athens even more than great Rome itself. This 
conception cannot permanently be left out of civics : 
quality is not so entirely a function of quantity as 
quantity is apt to think. With those to whom this 
idea is not too unfamiliar or uncongenial, our explana- 



280 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

tion of the exhibition must therefore start afresh, and 
once more from its Entrance Hall. Suppose, instead 
of beginning with the gallery of Civic Affairs, or at the 
Great Cities, with the body of the public, we follow 
our children. These are interested in simple natural 
conditions to start with in stories of hunter and 
shepherd, of miner and woodman, of peasant and fisher. 
So we enter the gallery devoted to " Geography " ; 
not as mere gazetteer, but as yielding and illustrating 
the fertile principle of Geographical Control. This 
conception is of the settlements of men, from small 
to great, as initially determined by their immediate 
environment ; and though thence extending into 
larger and larger towns and cities, yet retaining 
profoundly, even if obscurely, much of their initial 
regional character and activity, spirit and type. At 
one time they may transcend their original limitations, 
yet at another they may exaggerate their past defects. 
Thus local character and history which have been 
described at one time as providential, at another 
accidental, by recent historians again as racial turn 
out to be regional and occupational at bottom. Here, 
then, is a fundamental mode of approach and of 
developmental investigation for the Science of Cities ; 
and one full of interest, as geographers and sociologists 
begin to realise. Moreover, from this gallery we may 
return to that of Classic Cities, as scholars everywhere 
are doing, and with new interest of fresh light. Still 
more is this the case with the gallery into which this 
one immediately opens, that of " Medieval Towns and 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 

Cities"; with their development and history, as widely 
distinct from that of the classic world, and plainly 
conditioned by local and regional surroundings. 

From this medieval gallery we may now cross over 
to revisit that devoted to the Renaissance, and there 
observe how this destroyed as well as replaced the 
medieval past. Thence, however, let us return to 
consider, and with patience, the smallest and least 
familiar gallery of the present arrangement, yet one 
of the most significant, that of "Wars" (figs. 45-48). 
Wars of the Reformation and Renaissance, with their 
destruction of the Medieval Cities, and, with them 
also, of the smaller states ; and all this by the more 
favourably situated cities which thus arose as the 
Great (War) Capitals, which we have before con- 
sidered, but then too independently of their essential 
origin and history. This proposition, of course not 
unknown to historians, yet never sufficiently em- 
phasised, is here elaborated and strengthened, until 
our whole historical perspective is changed ; it alters 
our view of the Great Capitals, and, of course, of 
their present civilisation largely with it. 

Return once more to this gallery of Wars and 
their results : it further suggests how all these wars 
of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries 
prepared populations depressed, impoverished, and 
embittered for the coming in of the Industrial Age, 
and of its various revolutions. Here, then, we enter 
upon the gallery of "Industrial Cities," and with fresh 



282 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



lights upon their gloom: that of the paleotechnic 
industry, already enlarged upon in earlier chapters. 
We press on to the larger and brighter gallery of 
" Garden Suburbs, Villages, and Towns " ; with their 




FIG. 45. A Netherlands town (Goch) early in seventeenth century, still unspoiled 
by war. Note surviving medieval walls, internal gardens, and spacious out- 
lying ones (much reduced). 

hopeful promises of Garden Cities ; for these, albeit 
as yet mainly in the future, are plainly attainable. 

But to assure such Utopias, we must know our 
ground. Hence follows the next room, that of "Surveys 
of Towns and Cities." Here begin to appear results 
of value, to education, to science, and to action. The 
comparison of towns, small and great, is seen to be 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 283 

fruitful: the smallest may illuminate x the greatest; 
witness the comparison of Tay and Thames, that of 
Scone with Westminster, and Perth with London. 
That the study of historical cities, of Edinburgh or 
Chelsea, of Paris or of Ghent, may thus yield fresh 




Fi'J. 46. Mons : beginning of fortification by modern bastions, necessitated 
by seventeenth-century wars. No external gardens. 

results, may be readily enough accepted : but it is 
surprising to realise how even the smallest and 
obscurest of old and comparatively forgotten towns- 
say, Saffron Walden in Essex, or some yet smaller, 
say, Dysart or Largo in Fifeshire, perhaps above all 
their many analogues in the Low Countries or again 
some small new, manufacturing village, say, in 
Germany or the States may each throw some fresh 
and unexpected light upon the shaping of the historic 
world. The geologist and the prospector know how 



284 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



regional surveys, and even minute and microscopic 
inquiries, may be necessary ; and so in every natural 
science, and in public health and medicine. Thus 
the Study and Survey of Cities and each not only 
on to-day's town-plan, but on those of yesterday and 



HoN-xthcCa 

l.ik.nln vimKiiM-.if 

-All Mill'.,) 




* MONS 
FIG. 47. Mons, as fully fortified, in eighteenth century. 

of to-morrow must before long become as clearly 
recognised and accredited a branch of science as is 
nowadays the Geological Survey of every civilised 
State. 

American City Surveys have been already men- 
tioned, and with due appreciation. As regards 
civic theory and sociological interpretation, however, 
with all their intensiveness, these seem scarcely as 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 285 

productive as they should be, and doubtless soon will 
be. For amid the vivid and growing intensity of the 
American city's present, and its complex inter- 
miriglings of culture- elements and social types from 
all regions and cities of Europe,*all levels^and phases 




FIG. 48. Another Netherlands town (Grolla) as example of scientific fortification 
of seventeenth century. Civic interest, with gardens, etc., so manifest in 
Goch, have now disappeared (but modern interest, as for party warfare 
essentially, is well represented in the margin). 

also, the deciphering of social origins and the un- 
ravelling of contemporary factors are far more difficult 
than anywhere in Europe, even in its vastest and 
most seething capitals. Hence the significance, even 
for modern American inquirers, of our Surveys of 
more homogeneous cities, whose past steps in progress 
or deterioration are more plainly recorded and pre- 
served, whose types are less protean, and whose 



286 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

present conditions are less fluid. From all these, 
our main thesis becomes clear that Region and 
II Industry, Place, Work, and People, are reobserved 
and reinterpreted by such studies ; and these in ways 
far beyond the crude racialism, the empiric demo- 
graphy, or the callow eugenics of to-day. Here are 
large claims, and which cannot be justified adequately 
here : they must be left to explanation within the 
exhibition itself. 

Of practical issues only a word can here be said, 
for it is our initial thesis that survey and diagnosis 
must precede treatment ; and in this exhibition we 
are still in the stage of suggesting and initiating 
Surveys : we must not yet make too definite promises 
for them. 

Still, when a visitor cares to come beyond this 
gallery of Survey, he finds a " Civic Study," with its 
diagrams ; some clear, others unfinished, and express- 
ing doctrines and theories under consideration. 
Opposite this a drawing-office and workshop, with 
sketches in preparation, drawings to be framed and 
hung. The final gallery (unfinished beyond all 
others though it is, and to most visitors least attract- 
ive) contains, on the side of studies, some diagram- 
matic expressions of the nascent science of civics, and 
on the other a few such suggestions towards practice 
as we dare venture upon. Between the two stands 
the model of a City Cross of antique type; here 
renewed as symbol of the return of civic idealism, and 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 287 

of unity in social effort. Behind this also a rough 
model for an "Outlook Tower" as incipient Civic 
Observatory and Laboratory together a type of 
institution needed (indeed incipient) in every city, 
with its effort towards correlation of thought and 
action, science and practice, sociology and morals, 
with its watchword and endeavour of " Civic Survey 
for Civic Service." Thus our gallery adumbrates the 
conception of a " Civic Centre," one at many points 
nascent ; too often viewed as a mere piling together of 
monuments, but here with a clearing-house of social 
science with social action, of vital interaction of 
thought and deed. Our whole Exhibition of Cities 
and of Town Planning is now at length becoming 
seen as leading on into City Design. 

From this final (because generalised and unified) 
outlook, our triple range of galleries (a) that of classic 
cities and great capitals, (b) that of race, population, 
and child- welfare, (c) that of geographic and historic 
origins, surveys, and developments may be reviewed 
in thought. Our initial conception of a needed and 
possible Science of Cities is so far justified ; in 
principle undeniably so. Can we similarly review the 
civic activities of the past, the needs of the present, 
the possibilities of the future, towards worthy Civic 
Activities of our own ? May social feeling and 
reasoned design find expression in some great re- 
orcliestration of all the industries and arts, recalling, 
nay surpassing, the Acropolis or the Cathedral of 



288 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

old ? How, in short, is Civic Aspiration to be 
developed, guided, applied to the needed Art of City- 
making, which has ever been implied in Citizenship ? 
Of this the past, at its highest moments, reached 
visions we have again to recover, achievements we 
have still to rival. 

In Ghent there persist civic traditions rarely sur- 
passed, with a regional and civic life again affirming 
themselves ; and its exhibition thus peculiarly dis- 
played in its year of festival the varied productivity, 
elemental and higher, of a race and region of peasants, 
craftsmen, and artists. As her " Floralies " periodi- 
cally affirm, here are the flowers and fruits of her 
staple industry of horticulture, with the culture- 
elements which this has ever carried with it, becoming 
sociologically expressed as well as exuberantly dis- 
played. In this city and region too, above all others 
in the world as yet, the survey and interpretation of 
cities, both past and present, has reached its highest 
expressions, and these not only in the labours of an 
admirable school of historians Fredericq, Pirenne, 
and others but in literature of world-wide interest 
and appeal --as from the historic and individual 
pathos of Rodenbach's Bruges - la - Morte, to the 
passion, at once modern and Dantean, of Les Villes 
Tentaculaires of Emile Verhaeren, whom the world 
increasingly recognises among the very foremost of 
its singers. 

What wonder, then, if new forecasts of city life and 
city development should here have been appearing ? 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 289 

It has been more than a transient kermesse, this 
International Exhibition with its many congresses ; 
and we of the " Exposition des Villes " and its 
associated " Premier Congres International des Villes " 
have been not a little encouraged and hopeful of the 
future through meeting the citizen of Ghent, again 
city- proud and world-hospitable as of yore, as he rang 
us a universal welcome from his full- voiced bells, and, 
after centuries of decline, flung out his city's banner, 
once more foremost in a world-gathering of her peers, 
and towards a crusade yet worthier than that her 
champions led of old. 

So much, then, for the general plan of our exhibi- 
tion, and its perspective within the civic progress of 
Ghent : yet it is encouraging to add that our incentive 
to civic survey was immediately successful. From 
the adoption of our general plan, Ghent antiquaries, 
architects, and engineers vied with one another in 
contributions to the worthy presentment of their city, 
old and new ; the Ghent room was filled ; plans and 
perspectives overflowed ; and a model of the city's 
historic and monumental centre, on an imposing 
scale, adorned our largest hall. Better still, at the 
close of the exhibition, our continuous appeal towards 
keeping all this Ghent collection together, as the 
nucleus for a permanent Civic Museum, was energet- 
ically taken up by M. Bruggeman, President of the 
Academy of Fine Arts, who had been our friendly 

and helpful civic host throughout the great exhibi- 

19 



290 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

tion ; and an excellent location for this was found 
accordingly. 

The next destination considered for our itinerant 
collection and its propaganda of civics was a visit to 
New York ; and this was indeed arranged. But our 
correspondents there took counsel with one or two 
distinguished fellow-citizens who were visiting Ghent, 
notably of legal authority on building laws and kindred 
practical questions. Our exhibition, of course, is far 
from complete in needed exhibits, and labelling and 
catalogue are but in progress. It constantly, of course, 
has its critics, and welcomes them in every gallery, 
often indeed as a valued help to improvement. But 
never before had we realised how substantially mean- 
ingless, to minds of otherwise specialised activities, 
might be all the endeavours above described towards 
concrete presentment of civics and city development. 
Garden Cities and the like apart, our civic history or 
geography, surveys or ideals, met with no response, or 
worse than none. Thus, for instance, our gallery of 
the effects of War, with its series of illustrations, 
largely contemporary (cf. figs. 45-48), of the develop- 
ment of fortifications from medieval times, through 
the Renaissance, and thence to our present contrast of 
modern slums and boulevards, and with careful 
tracing of the effect of all these upon their internal 
economy and population all these things showed to 
our inspector, presumably not without some attempt 
to apprehend the significance we urged for, but so 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 

many little towns with a round wall : and similarly 
for other galleries. Little wonder, then, that our 
exhibition was dropped, as " unpractical," by our New 
York correspondents ! But now that a Town Plan- 
ning Exhibit, of essentially contemporary interest, and 
broadly corresponding to our own Royal Academy 
Exhibition of 1910 above described, is making its 
tour through leading American cities, and satisfying 
the immediate popular and practical interest accord- 
ingly, much the same criticisms, the same deeper civic 
questionings as here, must inevitably make themselves 
felt. With these must arise the sharp alternative, if 
not to utilise the material endeavours of the Cities 
and Town Planning Exhibition (supposing it then to 
be available), then all the more to repeat its intel- 
lectual endeavour, to renew the whole line of inquiries 
it raises, and to handle these with a yet fuller 
specialism, a richer elaboration of analytic detail, and 
with corresponding, and doubtless even more am- 
bitious, endeavours of comparison and of synthesis. 
Towards the making of this new science, and this 
the complexest, implying and involving all others 
without exception, a Cities Exhibition is thus needed 
in America to follow up, include, and interpret that 
of Housing and Planning movements. City Design, 
in the full and adequate sense, can thus, and thus 
only, be prepared for. 

The next destination discussed involved taking 
part in the important " Exposition de la Vie Urbaine," 
held under the auspices of the City of Lyons in 



292 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

1914, and which is probably the most comprehensive 
exhibition of the material appliances and elements of 
modern city life yet attempted, and that officially 
participated in by the largest number of cities as 
contributors. The utilisation of the Cities and Town 
Planning Exhibition, as a British national exhibit, 
was suggested on high authority, but not found 
financially practicable by the Treasury. As the far 
more important example of the delays of Rosyth has 
shown, the question of town planning, despite all its 
prominence at the Local Government Board, has as 
yet hardly been realised in other Ministries. 

Our next instructive misadventure was in Edin- 
burgh ; which, as more than planners know, has once 
and again been a veritable cynosure of town planning 
notably of the best in the thirteenth and the 
eighteenth centuries, as of its lapses in the nineteenth ; 
and which is again showing signs and stirrings, and 
these in many quarters, towards a new tide of civic 
advance commensurate with her traditions, situation, 
and possibilities. An application, widely signed by 
representative citizens, was made to the corporation 
to hold the exhibition ; all promised well, and fresh 
and comprehensive designs of improvement were in 
preparation for it. But a worthy and patriotic 
magistrate had meantime projected a small winter- 
garden, which is obviously much needed and would 
undeniably be of wide and popular use. The site 
chosen was, however, open to criticism, and received 
it. Controversy arose in the council, then in the 



TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 293 

press between rival ediles ; and this soon extended 
into a general melee engaging all good citizens ; who 
in Edinburgh, of course, are nothing if not aesthetes. 
Letters for and against the site, often by whole 
column-fulls, appeared in every morning's and 
evening's papers, and this for months. Public 
interest was excited to a fever-pitch, which no 
problems of Ireland, no vices or virtues of the present 
Government can hope to approach : so, if any 
demonstration be needed of the fascinating interest 
of points of town planning, and these to a whole 
community, here it is. As at other crises of history, 
Lord Rosebery at length intervened ; and with no 
uncertain sound. The promoters of the scheme were 
at length compelled to retire, but did so with banners 
unsurrendered ; while at least two of the innumerable 
alternative schemes which were proposed are now, it 
is said, being elaborated, towards arduous and doubt- 
ful struggle for existence in their turn. But amid 
all this admirable earnestness over one point, the 
general questions of civics and city design which had 
been all but successfully raised by the promoters of 
the exhibition, and which they at first naturally 
hoped would be thus brought into prominence, if not 
even urgency, were practically lost sight of by the 
public : the not unfriendly, but now more divided, 
town council did not feel justified in proceeding 
actively with an exhibition after such a stormy season ; 
and all concerned turned to different matters with 
relief. Meantime the moral abides and this for 



294 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

more cities than Edinburgh that the time, trouble, 
and expense of preparing for needed or desirable 
improvements, without first agreeing on the site to 
place them on, together with the loss of public 
utility through delays, for years, often even many 
years, and sometimes indefinitely, would pay not only 
for civic exhibitions, but for comprehensive town- 
planning schemes as well ; indeed over and over 
again. 

The return of this exhibition to Dublin was, how- 
ever, invited by the promoters of its Civic Exhibition 
for the summer of 1914 ; an undertaking on a scale 
of magnitude and funds smaller indeed than that of 
Lyons, but greatly exceeding any kindred exhibition 
as yet held in the British Empire or the United 
States. In view of the peculiar urgency of the 
housing situation in Dublin, and also of the re- 
stored metropolitan development involved by recent 
political changes, this repeated recall of the exhi- 
bition is an encouraging omen for the future of civic 
studies in cities generally, as these awaken to needs 
and to possibilities ; and this the more since it in- 
volves not only the continuance of the Dublin Survey 
initiated three years before, with its fuller develop- 
ment and wider diffusion, but correlation with the 
Dublin Town Planning Competition already referred 
to (pages 262-3) ; and, with all these, the experi- 
mental and not unsuccessful beginnings of a School 
of Civics which has proved suggestive, and even 
fruitful, both in educational and civic endeavours. 



CHAPTER XIII 

EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING, AND THE NEED 
OF CIVICS 

A general advance of public opinion on these subjects is in progress ; and 
the technical education of the town planner has correspondingly 
begun : schools of town planning are being founded. The recent 
formation of the Town Planning Institute, as an organised profession, 
must tend to further educational advance. Discussion of the nature 
and scope of education for town planning is thus on all hands 
beginning. 

If town planning is to meet the needs of the city's life, to aid its 
growth, and advance its progress, it must surely know and under- 
stand its city. To mitigate its evils, it needs diagnosis before 
treatment. To express its highest ambitions, it must appreciate and 
share them. Hence town planning and civics must be advanced 
together. Arguments against their separation, general and particu- 
lar, and from cities ancient and modern. 

THE general education of the public as regards 
better housing and garden suburbs, though slow 
and difficult until object-lessons were ready, is now 
going on rapidly, and in the easiest and most natural 
of ways, of direct observation and experience. Every 
co-operative tenant, every new garden-city or suburb 
occupant, is helping in this, and by example. His 
associations are actively propagandist ; and their 
exhibitions and conferences are now periodic and 
successful, alike in great cities and small witness for 

295 



296 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

1914 that of the Victoria League at the Imperial 
Institute, and that held by the Surveyors' Congress 
at Cheltenham, as well as that of the Liverpool 
School of Town Planning, and those initiated at 
Glasgow and elsewhere by the indefatigable energy 
of Mr Aldridge and the National Housing and Town 
Planning Council. Press, and politicians too, are 
at length becoming fairly aroused. Thus the whole 
group of associated movements we have been discuss- 
ing are ending their period of inception and sporadic 
initiative, and entering a new period, one in which 
civic reconstruction and reorganisation are claiming to 
occupy the very foremost place in public attention and 
policy. This, as already seen, is the case in Dublin, 
a city which seems ending its long period of super- 
activity in our national politics, with transition to a 
new and more harmonious phase, that of compre- 
hensive endeavour in civics. For here not only 
immediate city improvement, but fuller city develop- 
ment are being considered on all levels, elemental 
and economic, idealistic and cultural ; and these 
increasingly together, towards architectonic unity. 

Now, if such be discernibly the trend of the times, 
corresponding educational questions arise, and these 
twofold^^special and general : first, the question of 
the immediate and technical preparation of the 
architect and city official in town planning J^ficondly, 
of their further social education, also that of the 
citizen and his representatives in government, 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 297 

municipal and central alike. In a word, then, what 
of education in town planning, and of education 
in civics ? 

The technical education of the town planner has Q 
for. some time been in progress in Germany, but its 
effective initiative in this country has come from Sir 
William Lever by his foundation of a chair in the 
University of Liverpool, and his gift of a spacious 
building to house it. Here, under the energetic 
direction of Prof. Adshead, ably supported by 
Prof. Reilly, Mr Abercrombie, Mr Mawson, and 
other colleagues, there has been arising a school of 
town planning in the best sense, that of a school 
of thought as well as instruction, and with its organ, 
the Town Planning Review, already widely useful 
and influential. In Birmingham University Mr 
Cad bury has founded a lectureship, fitly held by 
Mr Raymond Unwin ; while in London, beside a 
growing attention to town planning, as in the 
excellent extra-mural atelier of architecture, so 
largely due to the initiative and devotion of Mr 
Lanchester, and also in the Summer School of Town 
Planning which has appropriately arisen at Hamp- 
stead, the University School of Architecture has 
also acquired the needed department. The recogni- 
tion of this new subject is thus practically assured, 
as in every great educational centre, a matter hence- 
forth but of funds and organisation, as these of the 
awakening of citizens. 

Among town planners themselves the need of 



298 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

organisation has been increasingly felt ; and, after a 
useful year or so of deliberation, this has taken form ; 
so that the establishment of town planning as a 
regular and organised profession may be dated with 
the incorporation in 1914 of the Town Planning 
Institute. The architectural (and traditional) grades 
of members and associates are themselves of two 
kinds, the one directly concerned with town planning 
as a constructjyje-art, and the other with the adminis- 
trative and legal regulation of it. The more each 
class understands of the other's work the better ; 
without technical comprehension the administrator 
may easily hinder more than help. Yet for each 
town - planning education must be protected from 
falling into that too external and technical discipline 
which has been the bane of architectural instruction. 
How may this be assured? In one way only: by 
accompanying it with a vital initiation also, that into 
the life and working of the city ; in a word, then, by 
the study of civics. Architecture has always rightly 
claimed to be regulative of the arts ; and now town 
planning makes this claim in turn to be regulative 
for architecture. If so, there is no avoiding or 
escaping from a still further claim, that of civics, as 
regulative and educative for town planning. 

The same holds good, and even more directly and 
obviously, for citizen and councillor, for the con- 
stituent and for his member, for the minister and for 
his officials. 

So far, then, the preceding argument will hardly 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 299 

seriously be disputed, that the educational problem 
before us is a twofold one ; not of technical town 
planning only, nor simply to be viewed as a top- 
dressing for our schools of architecture. Nor is 
civics a mere vague discourse of edification, for the 
citizen, for his servants and rulers. We need to 
establish educational facilities and opportunities in 
town planning and in civics together, and these as 
fully as possible for all concerned. Yet at this stage 
the practical man may, and actually does, say : " All 
very well, in theory, no doubt : but when we have 
as yet scarcely the means to establish the needed 
technical side, that of town planning, why increase 
our difficulties by dragging in civics as well ? Why 
not leave it for the present ; it will no doubt come in 
time." 

Very plausible. Yet to this two answers may be 
given : one long, general, and universal ; the other 
brief, immediate, and particular. The first of these 
may seem theoretic, but it is really derived from the 
oldest and widest recorded experience of the rise and 
fall of cities without number. This answer is tradi- 
tionally ascribed to an ancient writer in one of the 
most historic and deeply influential of all cities ; one 
near the convergence of three continents, and thus 
centrally situated for observation of their cities 
Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Mediterranean alike. 
He and his compatriots were thus uniquely familiar 
wit! i the spectacle of civilisations and empires, each 
more magnificent and powerful than its predecessor, 



300 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

yet each failing and falling in turn. So familiar, in 
fact, that their social thinkers were often able to 
diagnose such changes, predict such collapses, and 
this more clearly and boldly than any since have 
done ; and are accordingly remembered to this day 
as "prophets," even to the predominance of the 
predictive significance of the word over its simpler 
hortatory meaning. In old-world way our writer's 
broad-based generalisation has survived, with much 
other invaluable sociological literature of his people ; 
and it runs to the effect that unless the ideal build 
the house and with it the city also they labour in 
vain that build it. So much for housing, and for 
town planning ; and throughout their history. But 
our author does not forget the citizens, nor their 
rulers, their statesmen's strength or weakness after 
the city has been built, being himself a good deal of 
a builder, still more of a planner, for his own city, as 
to this day its most memorable king. Recalling 
doubtless also his long military experience, both in 
attack and in defence, as well as of civic and regional 
rule, he adds the further generalisation, that unless 
the ideal keep the city, its police, army, dread- 
noughts, and watchmen generally, watch in vain. 

This, it may be said, is all very fine, and even quite 
appropriate on Sundays : but we are now in an age 
of science, and its professors ought hardly to quote 
such things : surely they are not going over to the 
old theological camp ? Not indeed, as this has too 
long been standing. With it each successive science 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 301 

has struggled in its youth, and on the whole imposed 
its terms astronomy at the Renaissance, geology and 
biology in the last century. It is now coming to be 
the turn of civics to raise this discussion ; and no 
turn over of conventional and static concepts, as 
from the geocentric astronomy, the non-evolutionist 
geology and biology, such as our friends, clerical and 
lay, of all denominations admit as having been 
effected in the past by these preliminary sciences, has 
been so serious or so thoroughgoing as that which 
must soon be insisted on by civics and sociology. 
This insistence is indeed already begun by our 
scientific allies the psychologists, and particularly 
by the social psychologists, who are our very scouts 
and pioneers. These have already been discovering 
that many of the spiritual experiences, the moral 
changes or, in their terminology, the arousal of 
ideals in individuals, and the conception and applica- 
tion of them by groups which have been considered 
as unique and sacrosanct in every theological body, 
and are commemorated, even inculcated, accordingly 
on one day of the week (with a regrettable, yet 
apparently unavoidable, relapse to paleotechnic 
" civilisation," and its practices upon the other six 
days) are not so simply past or done with. On the 
contrary, for individuals and for groups alike, these 
individual experiences are now seen to be in principle 
still psychologically latent, and those group-enthu- 
siasms and changes socially practicable; and this 
throughout all seven days of the week. What the 



302 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

psychologists are thus seeing for individuals and 
groups, we are learning to see also for cities, and for 
present and future cities as well as for the past ones 
generalised by King David of old. An all-important 
thesis of civics therefore appears. With, and in the 
measure of, such eupsychic change, such idealism, 
social and personal, and of its expressions and appli- 
cation in civic development and in individual citizen- 
ship, our existing paleotechnic city and region are 
transformable. If so, the ideal of the city and region 
can so far be progressively realised ; and even to 
renewing the achievements of past cities, or surpass- 
ing them. Otherwise not. Without these changes, 
specialised schools of divinity and philosophy here, 
specialised laboratories of research and invention 
there, or newly specialised schools of town planning 
and architectural design anywhere, must all remain 
ineffective ; each as but a further enlargement of 
that dominant university and educational system 
which has been lately defined by a keen American 
critic as "the creation of a well-endowed moral 
vacuum." But with the arousal and upgrowth of 
the " University Militant," as the same writer states 
the positive ideal of education, and with that Civic 
Revivance which it aids and requires, the long-broken 
civic unity, of social life and industrial energy with 
constructive thought and vital education, correspond- 
ingly reappears. 

What is it that we most value in our Occidental 
civilisation ? Recent writers, of the Prussian school 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 303 

especially, have insisted upon the importance of racial 
and barbarian origins, of militant aristocracy and con- 
quering migrations (or as philosophers, upon all this, 
more or less thinly disguised from themselves, as the 
Hegelian " State ") ; and since Le Play we have been 
learning to do far fuller justice to the significance of 
occupational and regional elements. But while these 
are rightly discerned as fundamental, the civilisations 
which all such races and regions have long ago accepted 
as supreme are thereby more clearly justified ; how- 
ever our valuations of these may differ in detail, 
according to our various indebtedness, individual and 
regional. First the moral unity of ancient Israel, 
and then the spiritual intensity and human appeals 
of the later faiths, of which it has been the prepotent 
parent, have been justified in their survival, since ex- 
ceeding our Western uplifts of idealism. And this 
still holds, as our scientific mythologists revive St 
Peter's vision of the net, and apply it to lands and 
peoples of whom he could not dream. So the intel- 
lectual search and grasp of Hellas, its power and 
charm of artistic creation, are but the more realised 
as we renew universities, and recover skill. The 
solidarity, justice, and peace of Rome at her best 
have given inspiration to each new endeavour of 
social organisation ; and this whether imposed by the 
State from above, or renewed by revolutions from 
below. There in the past still stand Jerusalem, 
Athens, Rome: here in the present we progressive 
Americans, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, carrying on the 



304 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

torch as best we may what are we after all but the 
old barbarians, with our men of genius ever and anon 
rekindling our constantly failing lights from these 
old cities and their morning-lands of our civilisation ? 
" For 'tis far in the deeps of history the voice that 
speaketh clear." Those who do not see and feel this 
indebtedness to the past, are they not for the most 
part but dulled in the smoke-cloud of paleotechnic 
industry which overpowers their overgrown working 
villages ? hypnotised by the shining pence, the spots 
of the dice, upon its " city " gambling tables ? whirl- 
ing in the eddies, political or militant, of the " Great 
Capitals " ? or listening to the echoes from all these ? 
If not poisoned by luxury, chilled or maddened by 
misery, are they not too much fixed by comforts into 
unthinking routine or sullen acquiescence ? With 
this view, which we take it no one in his moments 
of reflection seriously differs from, of the paleotechnic 
city as in the main but neo-barbarian, we have the 
explanation of the severity with which our social 
critics have long been judging it. Widely though 
they may disagree between themselves as do Carlyle 
and Arnold, Gobineau and Marx, Ruskin and Kro- 
potkine, Meredith and Hello, Nietzsche and Tolstoi 
they differ but little in their estimates of the 
paleotechnic city. 

To discern, then, the ideals which build cities and 
which keep them, is thus the supreme problem of civics 
as history ; and civics as science. To interpret them 
is civics as philosophy ; and to renew them, city by 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 305 

city, is its quest, its task, its coming art with which 
our " politics " will recover its ancient and vital civic 
meaning. These lights that flash from the past upon 
our paleotechnic gloom are but from crystal faces 
shaped long ago by ancient group-idealisms. Yet our 
schemes of instruction " religious " and " classical " 
alike have proved and are still proving futile ; and 
this must necessarily be while they too simply seek to 
impose these venerable forms upon us as authoritative 
from without, or even expect us strictly to reproduce 
them from within. Only as group-idealisms awaken 
anew among ourselves, can our modern towns become 
recivilised into cities worthy of the name. There is 
no essential disharmony between these past develop- 
ments, and such as these incite us towards : after all, 
the flowering of cities has ever gone on like the 
intercrossing of flowers. 

How, then, may this enhancement of social life be 
effected? that is the question. The_4*aleoechnic 
economists, to do them justice, have^elaborated the 
conception of the division of labour : and it has long 
been recognised as the~urgenT~task to promote its 
better organisation. It is, in fact, in the measure of 
their endeavours towards this^that tory and whig, 
liberal and radical, imperialist and socialist, financier 
and philanthropist, syndicalist and even anarchist, 
have each byijturns the public ear ; and correspond- 
ingly it is in the measure of their failures to find 
the secret of social renewal that they_jose it^_also. 

Church and State, town-house and college, business 

20 



306 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and philanthropy, bureaucracy and compulsion, labour 
and revolution, each is tried, and each fails and goes 
on failing. Meanwhile everywhere, despite our suburb 
endeavours, our central replanning, slum and super- 
slum are still growing on and polarising apart, towards 
stagnation or catastrophe. 

Is it not time, then, for civics to have its hearing ? 
We cannot here venture into its many possible lines 
of policy : enough if it be granted that there is 
some virtue and value in that reconstructive effort 
especially urged in these pages with its growing 
reunion of citizens with planners, builders with 
gardeners, labourers with craftsmen, and artists with 
engineers; and all towards the betterment o the 
city's homes, the corresponding future of its children. 
With this element of group-idealism, others will 
follow, and find expression, in time even comparable 
to those of old. 

This general argument for civic education has 
been a long one ; but the second and particular 
answer to the objection against its urgency may be 
brief: that demand is arising, and this at many 
points. Every civic survey involves further civic 
studies. But a more urgent instance may be given. 
As we have above seen, here are the town planners 
constituting themselves into_a_prpfession ; a new 
Institute, like that of architects and engineers ; like 
them with aims of education for their successors, and 
also that frank recognition which responsibilities ever 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 307 

awaken, of fuller and wider access to knowledge for 
themselves. It is unanimously felt, therefore, that 
they must aim at nothing short of a metropolitan 
reference collection and bibliography, of adequate 
professional and studious completeness. What does 
this need of completeness involve ? Obviously, in 
the first place, to collect, as fully as knowledge and 
means admit, all that deals directly and technically 
with town planning. But the general problem of 
this renewing art what is it but the material ex- 
pression of the growth and lyfe of_nities. and at every 
level ; from the simplest problems of engineering and 
housing to architectural ones as great as ever in 
history. 

Economisation of energies and time, improvement 
of communications, of industrial and domestic condi- 
tions, all these are plain ; public health and recreation 
too ; but what less immediately obvious elements of 
the life and functioning of cities can their planner 
afford to ignore ? To deal with health one must be 
something of a hygienist ; must it not be the like 
with other things ? 

Though always working with the best intention, 
the town planner, in the measure of his lack of fore- 
sight, has in each age been creating new evils. 
Medieval city walls have long been seen to have 
compressed the population they were made but to 
defend ; but not yet, as our " War " gallery of the 
Cities Exhibition shows, has even the historian 
realised that multiplication of civic evils which were 



308 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

brought about by the tremendous town-planning 
movement of fortification, as developed in the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries, and of which 
modern boulevard-rings are but superficial mitiga- 
tions. Haussmann, cutting new interior boulevards 
through Paris at the expense of gardens and working- 
quarters, was of course consciously and strategically 
providing for internal city control by his imperial 
master's artillery and dragoons ; but to do emperor 
and edile justice, neither they nor their public had 
a suspicion of how the new and stately architectural 
perspectives with which they lined these boulevards, 
and which evoked such unqualified admiration in 
their day and this not only Parisian and provincial, 
but world-wide and with corresponding imitation 
accordingly were soon to be socially and econom- 
ically operative. 

At first all seemed perfect, all was prosperity. 
Everything that Napoleon and Haussmann had 
dreamed, planned, and worked for came to fruit, and 
beyond the brightest anticipation. Unprecedented 
demand for labour, both skilled and unskilled, with 
influx and growth of population, yet regularity of 
employment: rents and values rising for the land- 
lord's prosperity, and yielding increasing taxes for the 
city's growing budget ; and this spent in new public 
works, or in multiplication of steadily salaried func- 
tionaries ; while in both these classes of expenditure 
the State was proceeding no less merrily also. 
Fortunes were quickly made in building and con- 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 309 

traeting, still more in land speculation and in 
fin mce generally : and these gains were as freely 
spent in increased luxury-expenditures of every 
kind, in foods and wines, in servants and equipages, 
in costumes, jewels, and artistries. Hence an 
ever-increasing attractiveness of Paris for French 
and foreigners alike, with further growth of shops, 
hotels and cafes, theatres and music-halls. Never 
had town planner such success before ; what 
wonder, then, that other cities have since been 
following Haussmann's splendid precedent beyond 
all others? 

Yet how all this megalopolitan development 
was connected with the debacle of 1870-71, 
how it led up to and through the Commune, 
and even helped to prepare the tragic disorder 
and ruthless repression with which it closed, are 
no less matters of historic reproach, and of lessons 
still far from exhausted. 

Return to more everyday results, say those on 
public health. The physicians point out how the 
wholesale substitution of dusty boulevards and 
airless interior well-courts for gardens and play- 
ing-nooks told upon the health of children and 
mothers, and spread drink, tuberculosis, and other 
evils among men. Economists record how the 
high and costly new tenements raised house-rents, 
with depression of the family budgets in other 
respects, and with increase of social discontent and 
instability in ways manifold and how, above all, 



310 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the standardising of small flats with tiny rooms 
has pressed on the limitation of Parisian families, 
as in turn their example on that of the strength 
and growth of France. 

Such are but the simplest and most obvious 
examples of the many indictments which French 
social critics of all schools have made of Haussmann 
and his work. Of Berlin too, so dramatically the 
victor and the imitator of Paris, the kindred criticism 
has begun. Behind its monumental perspectives the 
student of town planning must not forget its innumer- 
able working-class courts, well packed out of sight 
between the boulevards. Of their perfect internal 
order a recent town-planning poster (issued, it need 
hardly be said, by a younger school than the imperial 
one) gives a glimpse, one so unsettling as to have 
provoked its prompt destruction by the redoubtable 
police-president von Jagow. Yet this simply repro- 
duced the woeful daily spectacle of a group of 
children standing forlorn under the notice of " Play 
is forbidden " : and for its revolutionary appeal it gave 
only the plain statement, "Six hundred thousand 
children in Berlin!" 

Paris and Berlin are assuredly not the only great 
cities of empire which are stunting their imperial 
race : but enough if our present point be clear that 
in town planning, as in less widely important matters, 
every error, be it of commission or omission, soon 
tells upon our city's life. 

And what of the arrest or the decline of cities ? 



EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 311 

arrest, as in Edinburgh or Dundee ; decline, as in 
Dublin. In what ways may the town planner here 
usefully intervene ? In many, provided he be willing 
in each case to consider the respective cases and causes 
with the civicist before venturing upon treatment. 
And the many positive evils of cities, may he not 
more safely design changes towards abating these, 
with some deeper understanding of them ? At no 
point of this deeper hygiene of cities dare we limit 
our studies without yet more limiting our efficiency, 
or perhaps negating it. 

Must not therefore the town planner's reference 
collection and library, which is plainly needed, and 
not only in London, but for each and every conurba- 
tion, embrace the essential literature of civics, as well \ 
as its wealth of plans and technical reports ? Thus I 
no one who sits down to consider this problem but 1 
will come to aims as comprehensive as those of our I 
Cities and Town Planning Exhibition an aim dual 
yet unified, as its name implies. 

Happily, the more responsible the town planner 
the wider becomes his outlook. Mr Unwinds well* 
known Town Planning thus devotes a chapter 
to the survey of cities. The Liverpool School 
of Town Planning is plainly embarking, by the 
very pressure of its daily technical problems, upon 
the fuller study of its own city, and its com- 
parison with all others. In Germany and America 
the same deepening studies are pressing; so that 
if the very words sociology and civics had never 



312 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

been heard of, every serious town planner would 
soon be inventing them. 

Before long, then, the School of Civics, with its 
observatory and museum of survey, its drawing- 
offices and business office, must become a familiar 
institution in every city, with its civic library in rapid 
growth and widening use, and all as a veritable power- 
house of civic thought and action. 

Since this prediction has been in proof, it has 
been strengthened by the resolute anticipation of the 
Dublin Civic Exhibition and of its School of Civics 

with the continued help of the active and public- 
spirited Institute of Civics which has initiated them 

to carry on in future years, if possible, a programme 
substantially of this kind. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE STUDY OF CITIES 

How best can we set about the study of cities? Personal endeavours of 
the writer, as examples of the many approaches to civics ; with an 
outline of beginnings of the needed civic observatory, museum, study, 
and laboratory in the Edinburgh Outlook Tower, etc. 

WE have seen that many, and in all countries, are 
awakening to deal with the practical tasks of citizen- 
ship. Indeed never, since the golden times of classic 
or medieval cities, has there been so much interest, so 
much good-will as now. Hence the question returns, 
and more and more frequently, How best can we 
set about the study of cities ? How organise speedily 
in each, in all, and therefore here and there among 
ourselves to begin with, a common understanding as 
to the methods required to make observations orderly, 
comparisons fruitful, and generalisations safe ? It is 
time for sociologists that is for all who care for the 
advance of science into the social world to be bring- 
ing order into these growing inquiries, these limitless 
fields of knowledge. 

The writer has no finally formulated answer, since 
his own inquiries are far from concluded ; and since 
no bureaucrat, he has not a cut-and-dried method to 

313 



314 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

impose meanwhile : nor can he cite this from others : 
he may best begin with his own experience. The 
problem of city study has occupied his mind for thirty 
years and more : indeed his personal life, as above all 
things a wandering student, has been largely de- 
termined and spent in restless and renewed endeavours 
towards searching for the secrets of the evolution 
of cities, towards making out ways of approach 
towards their discovery. And his interests and ex- 
periences are doubtless those of many. The nature- 
lover's revolt from city life, even though in youth 
strengthened and reinforced by the protest of the 
romantics and the moralists, of the painters and the 
poets, may be sooner or later overpowered by the 
attractions, both cultural and practical, which city 
life exerts. Studies of economics and statistics, of 
history and social philosophy in many schools, though 
each fascinating for a season, come to be felt in- 
adequate. An escape from libraries -and lecture- 
rooms, a return to direct observation is needed ; and 
thus the historic culture-cities classic, medieval, 
renaissance with all their treasures of the past- 
museums, galleries, buildings, and monuments come 
to renew their claim to predominate attention, and 
to supply the norms of civic thought. 

Again the view-points of contemporary science 
renew their promise now doctrines of energetics, or 
theories of evolution, at times the advance of psycho- 
logy, the struggle towards vital education, the renewal 
of ethics each in its turn may seem the safest clue 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 315 

with which to penetrate the city's labyrinth. Geog- 
rapher and historian, economist and aesthete, politician 
and philosopher have all to be utilised as guides in 
turn ; and from each of these approaches one learns 
much, yet never sufficient ; so that at times the 
optimist, but often also the pessimist, has seemed 
entitled to prevail. 

Again, as the need of co-ordination of all these and 
more constantly makes itself felt, the magnificent 
prosynthetic sketch of Comte's sociology or the 
evolutionary effort of Spencer reasserts its central 
importance, and with these also the historic Utopias. 
But all such are too abstract constructions, and have 
as yet been lacking in concrete applications, either to 
the interpretation or to the improvement of cities ; 
they are deficient in appreciation of their complex 
activities. Hence the fascination of those transient 
but all the more magnificent museums of contemporary 
industry which we call International and Local Ex- 
hibitions, centering round those of Paris in 1878, '89, 
and 1900, or claiming to culminate at San Francisco in 
191.5 ; with their rich presentments of the material 
and artistic productivity of their present, alike on its 
paleotechnic and neotechnic levels, and in well-nigh 
all sub-stages and phases of these. 

As we return from these, at one time the roaring 
forges of industrial activity of Europe and America 
must seem world -central, beyond even the metro- 
politan cities which dominate and exploit them. Yet 
at another time the evolutionary secret seems nearer 



316 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

through the return to Nature ; and we seek the 
synoptic vision of geography with Reclus, or of the 
elemental occupations with Le Play and Demolins, 
with their sympathetic study of simple peoples, and 
of the dawn of industry and society with the anthro- 
pologists. And thence we return once more, by way 
of family unit and family budget, to modern life; 
and even to its statistical treatments, up to Booth 
and Rowntree for poverty, to Galton and the 
eugenists, and so on. In such ways and more, ideas 
accumulate, yet the difficulties of dealing with them 
also; for to leave out any aspect or element of the 
community's life must so far lay us open to that 
reproach of crudely simplified theorising, for which 
we blame the political economist. 

One of the best ways in which a man can work 
towards this clearing up of his own ideas is through 
the endeavour of communicating them to others : in 
fact to this the professoriate largely owe and acknow- 
ledge such productivity as they possess. Well-nigh 
every teacher will testify to a similar experience: 
and the inquirer into sociology and civics may most 
courageously of all take part in the propaganda of 
these studies. For here as yet there are no estab- 
lished authorities to interfere, and no conventions to 
be broken ; while perhaps nowhere is it more true 
that " the people perish for lack of knowledge," and 
that even the little we can give may be of service. 
Such teaching, moreover, aids observation, even 
demands it. Thus are gradually rising here and 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 317 

there mutually helpful and stimulating groups, 
which may be again the condition of further pro- 
gress, as so often in the history of intellectual and 
social movement. 

Another of the questions one lying at the 
very outset of our social studies, and constantly 
reappearing is this ; What is to be our relation 
tcL^wFaetieal life ? The looker-on sees most of the 
game ; a wise detachment must be practised ; 
our observations cannot be too comprehensive or 
too many-sided. Our meditations too must be 
prolonged and impartial ; and how all this if not 
serene ? 

Hence Comte's "cerebral hygiene," and Mr 
Spencer's long and stoutly maintained defence of 
his hermitage against the outer world, his abstention 
from social responsibilities and activities, even those 
faced by other philosophers. Yet there is another 
side to all this : we learn by living ; and as the 
naturalist, beside his detached observations, and even 
to aid these, cannot too fully identify himself with 
the life and activities of his fellow-men in the simple 
natural environments he wishes to investigate, so it 
may be for the student of societies. From this point 
of view, "when in Rome let us do as the Romans 
do " ; let us be at home as far as may be in the 
characteristic life and activity, the social and cultural 
movements, of the city which is our home, even for 
the time being if we would understand its record 



318 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and its spirit, its qualities and defects, and estimate 
its place in civilisation. 

Still more must we take our share in the life and 
work of the community if we would make this 
estimate an active one ; that is, if we would discern 
the possibilities of place, of work, of people, of actual 
groupings and institutions or of needed ones, and 
thus leave the place in some degree the better of 
our life in it ; the richer, not the poorer, for our 
presence. Our activity may in some measure in- 
terrupt our observing and philosophising ; indeed 
must often do so ; yet with no small compensations 
in the long run. For here is that experimental 
social science which the theoretic political economists 
were wont to proclaim impossible ; but which is none 
the less on parallel lines and of kindred experimental 
value to the practice which illuminates theory, 
criticising it or advancing it, in many simpler fields of 
action say, engineering or medicine for choice. It is 
with civics and sociology as with these. The greatest 
historians, both ancient and modern, have been those 
who took their part in affairs. Indeed with all sciences, 
as with the most ideal quests, the same principle 
holds good ; we must live the life if we would know 
the doctrine. Scientific detachment is but one mood, 
though an often needed one ; our quest cannot be 
attained without participation in the active life of 
citizenship. 

In each occupation and profession there is a free- 
masonry, which rapidly and hospitably assimilates 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 319 

the reasonably sympathetic new-comer. Here is the 
advantage of the man of the world, of the artist and 
art-lover, of the scholar, the specialist of every kind ; 
and. above all, of the citizen who is alive to the 
many-sidedness of the social world, and who is willing 
to help and to work with his fellows. 

Moreover, though the woof of each city's life be 
unique, and this it may be increasingly with each 
throw of the shuttle, the main jvarp of life is broadljH] 
similar from city to city. The family types, the 
fundamental occupations and their levels may thus be 
more generally understood than are subtler resultants. 
Yet in practice this is seldom the case, because the 
educated classes everywhere tend to be specialised 
away from the life and labour of the people. Yet 
these make up the bulk of the citizens ; even their 
ever emergent rulers are but people of a larger growth, 
for better and for worse. Hence a new demand upon 
the student of cities, to have shared the environment 
and, conditions of the people, as far as may be their 
labour also ; to have sympathised with their difficulties 
and their pleasures, and not merely with those of the 
cultured or the governing classes. 

H ere the endeavours of the University Settlements 
have gone far beyond the " slumming " now happily 
out of fashion ; but the civic student and worker 
needs fuller experiences than these commonly supply. 
Of the value of the settlement, alike to its workers 
and to the individuals and organisations they influence, 
much might be said, and on grounds philanthropic 



320 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and educational, social and political ; but to increase 
its civic value and influence a certain advance is 
needed injts point -of "view, analogous to that made 
by the medical student when he passes from his 
dispensary experience of individual patients to that 
of the public health department. 

In all these various ways, the writer's ideas on the 
study of cities have been slowly clearing up, through- 
out many years of civic inquiries and endeavours. 
These have been largely centred at Edinburgh (as 
for an aggregate of reasons one of the most instructive 
of the world's cities, alike for survey and for experi- 
mental action), also at the great manufacturing town 
and seaport of Dundee, with studies and duties in 
London and in Dublin, and especial sympathies and 
ties in Paris, and in other Continental cities and also 
American ones and from among all these interests 
and occupations a method of civic study and research, 
a jnode of practice and application, have gradually 
been emerging. Each of these is imperfect, embryonic 
even, yet a brief indication may be at least suggestive 
to other students of cities. The general principle is 
the synoptic one, of seeking as far as may be to 
recognise and utilise all points of view and so to be 
preparing for the Encyclopaedia Civica of the future. 
For this must include at once the scientific and, as 
far as may be, the artistic presentment of the city's 
life : it must base upon these an interpretation of the 
city's course of evolution in the present : it must 
increasingly forecast its future possibilities ; and thus 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 

it may arouse and educate citizenship, by organis- 
ing endeavours towards realising some of these 
worthy ends. 

Primarily in this way, yet also from the com- 
plemental side of nature studies and geography, there 
have been arising for many years past the beginnings 
of a Civic Observatory and Laboratory in our Edin- 
burgh Outlook Tower. A tall old building, high 
upon the ridge of Old Edinburgh, it overlooks the 
city and even great part of its region ; and of the 
educative value of this synoptic vision every visitor 
has thus a fresh experience. Hence, for at least two 
generations before its present use, it has been a resort 
of tourists ; and its camera obscura, which harmonises 
the striking landscape, near and far, and this with no 
small element of the characteristic qualities of the 
best modern painting, has therefore been retained; 
alike for its own sake and as an evidence of what is 
so often missed by scientific and philosophic minds, 
that the synthetic vision to which they aspire may be 
reached more simply from the aesthetic and the 
emotional side, and thus be visual and concrete. In 
short, here, as elsewhere, children and artists may see 
more than the wise. For as there can be no nature 
study, no geography worth the name apart from the 
love and the beauty of Nature, so it is with the 
study of the City. 

Next, a storey below this high Outlook of the artist, 
and its associated open-air gallery for his scientific 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

brother the geographer, both at once civic and 
regional in rare completeness, there comes upon the 




FIG. 49. Outlook Tower, Edinburgh. 

main platform of the level roof, and in the open air 
the " Prospect " of the special sciences. Here, on 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 323 

occasion, is set forth the analysis of the outlook in 
its various aspects astronomic and topographical, 
geological and meteorological, botanical and zoolo- 
gical, anthropological and archeeologic, historical and 
economic, and so on. Each science is thus indicated, 
in its simple yet specialised problem. This and that 
element of the whole environment is isolated, by the 
logical artifice of science, from the totality of our 
experience. The special examination of it, thus 
rendered possible, results in what we call a " science," 
and this with a certainty which increasingly admits 
of prevision and of action. Yet this science, this 
body of verifiable and workable truths, is a vast and 
wholesale suppression of other (and it may be more 
important) truths, until its reintegration with the 
results of other studies, into the geographic and social 
whole, the regional and civic unity before us. Here 
in brief, then, is our philosophy of civics, and our claim 
for civics in philosophy. Thus upon our prospect 
the child often starts his scientific studies, the boy 
scout his expedition. Yet to this the expert must 
return, to discuss the relation and applications of his 
own science with the philosopher as citizen and the 
citizen as philosopher. 

The storey below this prospect is devoted to the 
City. Its relief-model maps, geological and other, 
are here shown in relation to its aspects and beauty 
expressed in paintings, drawings, photographs, etc. ; 
while within this setting there has been gradually 
prepared a Survey of Edinburgh, from its prehistoric 



324 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 




CAMERA. 



PROSPECT. 



EDINBURGH. 1 



SCOTLAND. 



LANGUAGE. 



EUROPE. 



WORLD. 



FIG 50. Outlook Tower in diagrammatic elevation, with indications of uses of its 
storeys as Observatory, Summer School, etc., of Regional and Civic Surveys ; 
with their widening relations, and with corresponding practical initiatives. 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 325 

origins, and throughout its different phases, up to the 
photographic details of the present day. In this 
way the many standpoints usually divided among 
specialists are here being brought together, and with 
educative result to all concerned. 

The next lower storey is allotted to Scotland, with 
its towns and cities. The next to Greater Britain, 
indeed at times to some representation of the whole 
English-speaking world, the United States no less 
than Canada, etc., the Language being here taken as 
a more sociological and social unity than can be even 
the bond of Empire. The next storey is allotted to 
European (or rather Occidental) civilisation, with a 
general introduction to historical studies and their 
interpretation, and also with the work of a Current 
Events Club, with its voluminous press-cuttings on 
many subjects, largely international and general ; 
and furthermore to the comparison of Occidental 
cities. Finally the ground floor is allocated to the 
Oriental civilisations and to the general study of 
Man, departments naturally as yet least developed. 
But the general principle the primacy of the civic 
and social outlook, intensified into local details with 
all the scientific outlooks of a complete survey ; yet 
all in contacts with the larger world, and these suc- 
cessively in enlarging social zones, from that of the 
prospect outwards will now be sufficiently clear ; 
and of course be seen as applicable to any city. It 
may be experimented with in any city, in anyone's 
study, even begun upon the successive shelves of a 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

book-case, or still better, in the co-operative activity 
of a Current Events Club ; and this again, if possible, 
along with a Regional and Civic Survey Committee. 
On any and every scale, personal or collective, it will 
be found to reward a trial. 

What now of practical applications? Returning 
for the present purpose to the City's storey alone, 
though the main presentment is that of a survey, 
an exhibition of facts of past and present, a Civic 
Business-room adjoins this. Here has been for many 
years in progress the main practical civic work of 
this Tower its various endeavours towards city 
betterment. Largely the improvement of those 
slums, already referred to as the disgrace and diffi- 
culty of Old Edinburgh ; a work of housing, of re- 
pair or renewal, of increase of open spaces and 
when possible of gardening them ; of preservation of 
historic buildings, of establishment of halls of colle- 
giate residence with associated dwellings, and so on. 
Each piece of work has been undertaken as circum- 
stances and means allowed ; yet all as part of a 
comprehensive scheme of long standing, and which 
at an increasing rate of progress may still be long 
of accomplishment. Briefly stated, this scheme 
is of the preservation and renascence of historic 
Edinburgh, from the standpoints both of town and 
gown ; that is, at once as City and as University, 
and each at their best. This demands the renewal 
arid within this historic area especially, dilapidated 
and deteriorated though it at present be of that 



THE STUDY OF CITIES 



327 



intimate combination of popular culture and of 
higher education, and of that solidarity of civic and 
national spirit, with openness and hospitality to the 
larger world English, Colonial, American, Con- 
tinental which are among the best traditions of 




FIG. 51. Ramsay Garden, University Hall, Edinburgh. 

Edinburgh, indeed of Scotland, with her historic 
universities and schools. 

An analogous centre has also long been struggling 
towards a foothold in London. This includes the 
germ of a Department of Civics, at first in temporary 
premises at the University of London, and next more 
largely housed through the recent reconstruction of 
Crosby Hall in connection with a University Hall 
of Residence upon Sir Thomas More's garden at 
Chelsea ; schemes which have alike been fortunate in 



328 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

finding co-operation, both practical and studious. The 
studious point of view, and civic aim of action, here 
unite towards the recovery of the best traditions of 
Chelsea, which are only second to those of the two 
great cities of London and Westminster themselves, 
and in some respects surpass them. These traditions 
are considered not merely as of historic interest and 
associative charm, but as a vital heritage, capable of 
influencing and inspiring the townsman as well as the 
student, and thus of affording a new yet natural line 
of development to the borough : no less than that of 
becoming a veritable collegiate city, and correspond- 
ingly of affording to the too cold individualism and 
too isolated intellectuality of London University the 
beginnings of the social advantages and cultural 
impulse of the associated life. 

But all this, it may be said, is too academic, too 
much the mere record of a wandering student, and 
of his changing outlooks and view-points, his personal 
experiments and endeavours. What of other than 
university cities ? How are civic surveys and en- 
deavours to be applied more generally? A fair 
question, to which an answer will be attempted in 
the next chapter. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE SURVEY OF CITIES 

How are civic inquiries and city surveys to be made more general, 
thorough, and efficient? An appeal to City Museums and Libraries, 
with examples of beginnings in small towns and great. School 
Surveys as educational processes and products ; examples from 
primary schools, training colleges, and universities. Higher signifi- 
cance of surveys in education and in philosophy. Their applications, 
moral and social ; their appeal to all groups and denominations 
accordingly. 

How are city surveys and endeavours to be applied 
more generally, brought thoroughly before the public, 
made effective, complete, accessible, intelligible ? 
That is the question from the last chapter, which we 
must attempt to answer in this ; and on several 
convergent lines. 

Like other professional bodies, the Museum 
Curators of Great Britain have their Annual Con- 
gress : this took place in Dundee in 1907 ; and was 
appropriately in the gallery of the city's museum 
devoted to " Old Dundee." Having listened to the 
natural and proper lamentations of the curators as to 
the deficient support of their institutions, and to various 
expressions of their anxiety to increase public interest 
accordingly, the writer threw his paper into the form 

329 



330 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

of a practical proposition, which may be summed up 
somewhat as follows : 

You lament that you have not sufficient funds 
adequately to maintain your museums and still less 
to increase them. Is it not needful to discover some 
way adequately to advertise your institutions of 
course properly and legitimately, in due curatorial 
fashion - - by making them interesting to a larger 
proportion of your community ? At present your 
antiquities attract few save the antiquarians, a 
dwindling class. Thus we have here our admirable 
city-history collection, our town in 1800, 1700, 1600, 
1500, and yet beyond, to the primitive Celtic hill-fort 
and its Roman transformation ; and this does naturally 
attract the antiquarians. But the value of this collec- 
tion depends upon each of these exhibits having had 
actuality in its day. It is its authenticity which gives 
it interest. Why should this collection now lack 
actuality in our day? Why no adequate exhibit 
of this city in 1900, in 1907? Why not give it 
this, and add to our Museum of the Past a corre- 
sponding exhibit of the Present? How can this 
be done? Easily. See, for instance, Booth's Life 
and Labour in London, with its great map ; see 
the corresponding surveys of other cities, York, 
Manchester, Dundee, and the like. Do something 
of the same for each city now. Obtain more pictures 
and photographs of its present beauty and ugliness ; 
obtain statistics and other particulars from the 
town - house, the registrars, and so on, so that 



THE SURVEY OF CITIES 831 

any and every active citizen shall henceforth find 
in the museum the most ready and convenient 
place for getting up all he wants to know about 
his city. In this way your museum will gain a 
new set of frequenters, each a future friend, for 
you will soon find that you can count on their 
support, and that increasingly. Nor is this all you 
can do ; besides the few antiquarians and the many 
more practical men, who are interested in the past 
and the present respectively, you have a third class, 
small, yet important and increasing, those who are 
beginning to dream of the future. These wish to 
see some progress in their town, some actual better- 
ment, the cleansing of its slums, the erection of 
new buildings and institutions, the supply of open 
spaces, and above all, the planning of its future 
extensions its practicable Utopia Eutopia in fact. 
Add, therefore, to your galleries of the Past and 
of the Present a third room, or at least a screen 
or two for this concrete exhibition of your City's 
Future, and you will thus bring to the museum 
a third and new class of supporters. Hence, even 
if you do not care for your city, if you do not 
yet feel its impulse to citizenship, consider this pro- 
posal as at least of a new attraction, a legitimate 
form of public appeal; and see whether it does 
not before long reward you to carry it out. 

This proposal, almost in so many words, was 
warmly encouraged by the president of the Con- 
gress ; and was actively discussed at a special 



332 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

meeting, at which a large number of the museum 
curators of the United Kingdom spoke warmly 
in its favour, and decided to see what could be 
done towards carrying this out for their respective 
cities and in their museums. The preceding pro- 
posal applies, of course, to public libraries and city 
librarians, no less than to museums and their curators. 
How, then, are we as civic sociologists at once to 
aid in this movement as well as learn from it ? j 
Is it not time that curators and librarians, geologists 
and naturalists, local historians and antiquaries, 
architects and artists, business men and economists, 
clergymen and social workers of all denominations, 
politicians of all groups, were uniting their forces, 
at first no doubt largely as individuals, but also 
bringing in their respective societies and organisa- 
tions as far as may be, towards this creation of their 
Civic Survey and Museum ? 

As suggestive examples of the many-sided progress 
of this movement, we may take one of the small 
towns and one of the great Saffron Walden and 
Newcastle-on-Tyne. In the first was organised an 
active co-operation between the Museum Curator 
and the Natural Science Department of the Training 
College ; thus was initiated a Survey Society open 
to citizens as members, and to young folks at work, 
at school, or college as associates (and at the moderate 
annual subscriptions of Is. and 3d. respectively). In- 
terest was successfully aroused ; the museum was 
improved, and not simply in various of its collections, 



THE SURVEY OF CITIES 333 

or by forming this new regional one, but above all 
in public sympathy and educational usefulness. A 
photographic survey was undertaken ; with the help 
of a town-planning architect the ancient town was 
more clearly mapped and interpreted, and even re- 
constructed in vivid perspective at various phases of 
its past. From this local exhibit has easily been 
arranged a smaller type-collection, which now circu- 
lates on loan with the Cities and Town Planning 
Exhibition and elsewhere, as a very model of the 
practicability and interest of such a survey. The 
preservation of the town's monuments and buildings, 
the planting of trees and shrubs, the encouragement 
of gardening on every scale from child's flower-pot 
and home window-box onwards has been a natural 
development, as also an increased interest in public 
health and housing. Best of all, a new tide of civic 
feeling has arisen ; pageantry and festivals are more 
readily undertaken, the atmosphere of citizenship can 
be more fully breathed, and life at various points 
is brightened, as community and individuals thus 
learn anew to interact. 

What now of Newcastle ? By good omen, as 
this chapter is being written, there has been passed 
in the City Council a motion by Councillor Adams, 
here well worth citation as a typical one, equally 
applicable elsewhere : 

" That it is desirable to establish a Civic Museum 
for the City, wherein may be illustrated among other 
things the history of the town, and the growth and 



334 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

development of the municipal, social, and industrial 
life of the City ; and that the Public Libraries 
Committee be requested to consider and report upon 
the best means of carrying the same into effect." 

Of course London has now its Museum in Stafford 
House; and there are notable beginnings, and still 
more materials, in many other cities. The movement 
may therefore be considered as assured in principle ; 
but the less time now lost the better for advancing 
it locally and in execution. Even apart from the 
urgency for civic development, for town planning 
and housing already emphasised, every curator and 
librarian knows how increasingly hard it becomes 
every year to collect the objects and illustrative 
matter, which not so long ago were cheap and re- 
latively abundant. 

Beside all the agencies just named, there is another, 
weakest and least specially prepared hitherto, yet 
fullest of hope and possibility of all the primary 
school. Could we but convince a single one of the 
Education Departments English, Scots, or Irish, that 
of an American city or a Continental country that in 
this movement of town study we have the comple- 
ment of the nature study (which these departments 
have more or less recognised), and a means of cor- 
relation and vitalisation of studies even more widely 
potent and easily applicable, as from "school journeys" 
and boy-scouting onwards a national survey would 
soon be in progress with its regional and civic division 



THE SURVEY OF CITIES 335 

of labour. Meantime there are excellent beginnings, 
and ut many points : as notably, for instance, by Mr 
Valentine Bell in a Lambeth primary school, where 
his boys have effectively aided him in making a 
borough survey which was at Ghent and Dublin a 
delight and impulse to teachers from all lands ; and 
of which the educational value and result at home is 
also manifest and fruitful. Here, in fact, are begin- 
nings for a " Know your City " movement which may 
spread through our towns as of late through A merican 
ones ; the more since, in the rise and growth of the 
boy scout movement, we have beginnings of re- 
gional survey ; and from this to real beginnings of 
city survey is a natural step. 

Coming now to l^niversiijLSchools of Geography, 
that of Oxford has long been peculiarly effective upon 
survey lines, and among the many excellent regional 
theses of Prof. Herbertson's pupils, Miss L. M. Hardy's 
admirable " Survey of Salisbury " may be cited as a 
peculiarly instructive and convincing type ; and of 
vivid significance from many points of view, and 
instructive to bishops and to town planners alike. 

It is peculiarly encouraging to the writer that, 
after too long interruption, the regional surveys which 
characterised the Edinburgh Summer Meetings of 
many years past, should have been actively resumed 
at Easter 1914, and this independently and success- 
fully by a fresh and younger group, notably the 
active spirits of the Saffron Walden Survey aforesaid, 
Miss Barker, Messrs Maynard and Morris, and others 



336 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

mentioned or not above ; and that these further have 
been preparing a wide appeal to teachers " for the study 
and practice of regional survey in country and town, 
and for the consideration of its application in primary 
and secondary education." The invitation of this 
nascent association to Dublin has opened a new series 
of contacts, and thus the method spreads apace. The 
British Ecological Society is now as definitely com- 
mitted to the mapping of the British Isles as can be 
the Geological Survey in its older field ; but few of 
its members probably even know how its prime 
initiator, the late Robert Smith, undertook the vege- 
tation maps which bear his name, and are now classic, 
as his part of the division of labour of that regional 
survey of Scotland, and not of the Edinburgh district 
only, which is a central purpose of the Outlook Tower, 
and a main justification of its plea for adaptation of 
its principle in every city and district. 

One final word, of education now at its highest, of 
its very philosophy, and this at university levels ; and 
why not beyond ? What if the long-dreamed synthesis 
of knowledge, which thinkers have commonly sought 
so much in the abstract and by help of high and 
recondite specialisms, logical, metaphysical, psycho- 
logical, mathematical, and the rest, all too apart from 
this simple world of nature and human life be really 
more directly manifest around us, in and along with 
our surveys of the concrete world ? What if Aristotle, 
that old master of knowledge, turns out to have been 



THE SURVEY OF CITIES 837 

literally, and not merely metaphorically, speaking in 
urg ng " the synoptic vision " ? For surely " general 
views " may well be helped by general views. What 
if philosophic aims may be served, better than in 
the study alone, in course of an experience again 
literally peripatetic? And, if it be claimed that beyond 
the highest speculative education is the active, the 
ethical, may we not add to our surveys, service? 
And to our going about, doing good ? 

It may well be among the less specialised and least 
municipally powerful members of the community 
that the civic enthusiasms and energies of the opening 
future may be most vitally awakening. And this 
not only among the workers, and the artists who at 
their best most truly voice them, but also among 
women, and among the children of our schools. 
Hence in two recent volumes of a popular series of 
the easiest access, Evolution and Sex, the writer 
and his colleague have not hesitated to state 
the appeal of civics and city betterment to these, as 
at once eupsychic, eutechnic, and eutopian ; and upon 
the most general grounds, of human life, in its con- 
tinuance and its uplift. 

Nor can the churches of all denominations much 
longer delay that comprehensive dealing with the 
field of civic renewal which has been promised and 
urged on all sides, as in papal encyclicals, bishops' 
charges, and moderators' addresses, and in the Citizen- 
Sunday discourses which these encourage or inspire. 
It is but bare justice to recognise that fundamental 



338 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and vital civic endeavours have never been lacking 
from their remotest past, and that modern develop- 
ments and adaptations of these are springing every- 
where. The disunion of the churches and their 
supersedure by the State are, of course, older than 
the paleotechnic dispensation, but their long in- 
effectiveness in dealing with it has proved its potent 
influences upon them. Yet as their entrance upon 
social renewal grows clearer in thought and more 
definite in action, their emancipation must progress 
accordingly ; and before long they may be dealing 
more vitally with many civic problems than can the 
State and its administrators. It is ever a group- 
emotion, a group-enthusiasm, which makes and re- 
makes the cities : and the cry, " O Jerusalem ! Jeru- 
salem ! " will never fail of echo and response through- 
out the ages. 



CHAPTER XVI 

CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES, 
OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOVERNMENT 

All these surveys are but preliminary to action upon the municipal and 
the national scale. Limitations of recent "Land Report" and 
kindred literature of surveys, now increasingly of political influence 
and approaching application ; indications of needed fuller develop- 
ment of such inquiries, to regional surveys. 

Recommendations of the Sociological Society (Cities Committee). 
Dangers of Town Planning before Survey. Methods and uses of 
this survey ; with outline scheme for a City Survey and Exhibition. 
Examples already in progress. 

HITHERTO we have been occupied with the pre- 
liminaries of town planning, through regional and 
civic surveys and civic education generally; yet 
merely with the occupation of strategic points, like 
the public museum and library, preparatory to the 
reduction of the town-house ; and of the primary 
school and training college towards a march upon 
Whitehall itself. To make these larger designs 
perfectly clear, let us first offer a criticism of the 
limitations of the recent " Land Report " of 1914, 
which, although unofficial, has been commonly under- 
stood as preparatory to Government action ; and 
thereafter offer to the consideration of municipal 
authorities and their town planners a final and 

339 



340 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

reasoned argument for civic survey before town plan- 
ning, with suggestions in outline for initiating and 
conducting this. 

First, then, the " Land Report," and with special 
appeal to the distinguished writer to whose methods 
and suggestions it is understood to be much indebted. 

It is no discourtesy, among either scientific or 
practical men, to recognise that the expert analyst of 
a given soil, or the skilled valuator of its present crop, 
may not equally have acquainted himself with the 
rocks below, nor fully considered the future growths 
this soil may yet be brought to bear. First, then, 
we recognise in Mr Seebohm Rowntree the very 
foremost of social surveyors, who not only from his 
"Poverty" survey of York has thrown new light 
upon the question of poverty everywhere, but who 
also, in his yet more intensive and comprehensive 
study of rural Belgium, has surpassed the Belgians 
themselves. We thus cannot fail of appreciation of 
the " Land Report," which is so plainly indebted to 
his methods and guidance, and look with correspond- 
ing hopefulness for a companion Towns Report, soon to 
be in preparation upon more or less similar lines. Yet 
in view of the assured and desirable influence which 
such vast masses of conveniently arranged information, 
such clear and persuasive summary, such suggestions 
for future policy, must have upon opinion and even 
upon approaching legislation, it is needful here to 
interject a warning word, even an expostulation, as to 
the limitations of the methods which Mr Rowntree's 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 341 

example has been defining for further inquirers, and 
is establishing for the statesman's practical use. 

No modern city, and probably York less than most, 
is to be adequately understood, as he has treated it, 
apart from its past history, even as regards the 
problems of poverty and of irregularity of employ- 
ment which seem so modern. With fuller space, of 
a chapter for each city, it would be possible to justify 
this criticism for city after city in detail. In Edin- 
burgh or in Dundee, in Belfast or in Dublin, in 
Bruges or in Ghent, it is easy to see and prove the 
persistence of historic factors, in each case widely 
different, which profoundly modify the local situation, 
and which are, to the contemporary factors upon 
which Mr Rowntree so ably specialises, as differing 
warps to similar woofs ; and thus give us different 
social fabrics accordingly. 

Still less are the rural provinces of Belgium, so 
admirably described in another notable volume of Mr 
Rowntree's, really to be understood, without the light 
of other correspondingly careful volumes, dealing 
with those world-historic city-developments, of many 
and mingled types, which are the crowded foci of 
these same provinces : nor are all these together 
adequately intelligible for study, still less utilisable 
for comprehensive statesmanship, without correspond- 
ing surveys of the new industrial town developments 
and the "black country" associated with them. 
Rustic and urban relations must thus be restudied, 
interpreted together, in past and in present, and for 



342 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

province by province ; for Bruges and Ghent with 
West and East Flanders, or Liege with its antique 
prince-bishopric and its modern industrial valleys 
alike. Similarly for York, and yet more for Leeds ; 
they need study along with Yorkshire : for it is not 
in Belgium only that the modern relations of town 
and country can be seen together in a single flash- 
light, as " Les Villes Tentaculaires : Les Campagnes 
Hallucinees." 

Such regional geography has long been familiar 
in French science, literature, and political discussion, 
and has been aiding those increasing measures towards 
decentralisation, of which the renewal of French 
provincial universities during the last generation was 
but a beginning. But it is constantly the insular 
misfortune of England to learn but tardily from 
France. We remember how her ironclads and 
screws, her smokeless powder, her submarines and 
aeroplanes were each well-nigh perfected before our 
Admiralty could be persuaded to recognise their 
existence ; but in these days of better mutual under- 
standing, it is surely not too much to hope of our 
statesman of peace, our advancing legislators and 
their expert inquirers, to be acquainting themselves 
more fully than heretofore with the recent advances, 
in France especially, of regional geography. As they 
do this, they cannot but appreciate and adopt its 
lucid and comprehensive methods, and be aided by 
its pregnant conclusions. 

All this is no mere fault-finding with good and so 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 343 

far legitimately specialised work ; it is but pointing 
how it needs to be complemented in the immediate 
future. It therefore cannot be dismissed by the 
practical politician with the customary sneer of 
" academic," still less as " sentimental," as he is wont 
(contradictorily) to say in a different mood. It is a 
definite claim for fuller and more scientific treatment, 
and this not simply upon historic considerations, but 
also upon geographic grounds. It is that of yet more 
comprehensive studies ; not only of countries and of 
towns separately to-day, in which Mr Rowntree 
is so far a master, nor even of their past in relation 
to their present, and conversely: it4s-4he stud^of 
town in country, and of country in town, and these 
through past and present alike. It is the appeal of 
regional unities, yet also of these as regional diversities. 
It is the protest, not of the academic man against 
the practical one, but for the more general view 
which is necessary to thought and action alike, against 
what is really a too academic over-specialism. It is 
time, then, to be ending the ancient feud, the artificial 
separation of town and country, the isolation of 
town councils and county councils ; and to be seeing 
that town-mouse and country-mouse have too long 
been treated as distinct species, and are henceforth, 
as of old, but one. Land Reports and Urban Reports 
have thus to be completed and combined, yet also 
analysed, into^ Regional Reports, and this for vital 
statement, for effective treatment also. In these we 
must end the isolation of our present facts from the 



344 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

past ones which have so often given them birth. 
Only thus may be put an end on one hand to our 
present too dead documentation as history, and to 
our too hasty journalism and hastier party speechify- 
ing on the other. Hence before inadequate (though 
wholesale) national bill-drafting, and its resultant 
interminable bill- and act-amending, all too in- 
adequate still, let us advance beyond even rustic and 
urban reports, and be getting these into the stage of 
regional surveys. With these social diagnoses, the 
corresponding local treatment and revivance will also 
progress ; and our statesmen may then far more 
clearly see how best to accelerate advance, regionally 
and throughout. 

We come now to the need of City Surveys and 
Local Exhibitions as preparatory to Town Planning 
Schemes. It may but bring our whole argument 
together, and in a way, we trust, practically con- 
vincing to municipal bodies, and appealing also to 
the Local Government Boards which in each of 
the kingdoms have to supervise their schemes 
if we here utilise with slight abbreviation, a memor- 
andum prepared in the Sociological Society's Cities 
Committee, and addressed to the authorities con- 
cerned, local and central alike. 

I. SUMMARY OF THE CITIES COMMITTEE'S WORK 

We welcomed and highly appreciated the Town 
Planning Act, and we early decided that it was not 



CITV SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 345 

necessary for this Committee to enter into its dis- 
cussion in detail, or that of its proposed amendments. 
We have addressed ourselves essentially to the 
problem of Town Planning itself, as raised by the 
study of particular types of towns and districts 
involved ; and to the nature and method of the City 
Survey which we are unanimously of opinion is 
necessary before the preparation of any Town 
Planning Scheme can be satisfactorily undertaken. 
Schemes, however, are in incubation, alike by muni- 
cipal officials, by public utility associations, and by 
private individuals, expert or otherwise, which, what- 
ever their particular merits, are not based upon any 
sufficient surveys of the past development and present 
conditions of their towns, nor upon adequate know- 
ledge of good and bad town planning elsewhere. 
In such cases the natural order, that of town survey 
before town planning, is being reversed ; and in 
this way individuals and public bodies are in danger 
of committing themselves to plans which would have 
been widely different with fuller knowledge ; yet 
which, once produced, it will be too late to replace, 
and even difficult to modify. 

We have therefore, during the past few years 
addressed ourselves towards the initiation of a 
number of representative and typical City Surveys, 
leading towards Civic Exhibitions ; and these we 
hope to see under municipal auspices, in conjunction 
with public museums and libraries, and with the 
co-operation of leading citizens representative of 



346 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

different interests and points of view. In Leicester 
and Saffron Walden, Lambeth, Woolwich, and 
Chelsea, Dundee, Edinburgh, Dublin, and other 
cities progress has already been made : and with 
the necessary skilled and clerical assistance, and 
moderate outlays, we should be able to assist 
such surveys in many other towns and cities. 
Our experience already shows that in this inspiring 
task, of surveying, usually for the first time, the 
whole situation and life of a community in past 
and jjresent, and of thus preparing for the planning 
scheme which is to forecast, indeed largely decide, 
its material future, we have the beginnings of a 
new movement one already characterised by an 
arousal of civic feeling, and the corresponding 
awakening of more enlightened and more generous 
citizenship. 

II. RECOMMENDATION BY THE COMMITTEE 

The preparation of a local and civic survey previous 
to the preparation of a Town Planning Scheme, 
though not actually specified in the Act, is fully 
within its spirit ; and we are therefore most anxious 
that at least a strong recommendation to this effect 
should form part of the regulations for Town 
Planning Schemes provided for the guidance of local 
authorities by the Local Government Board. With- 
out this, municipalities and others interested are in 
danger of taking the very opposite course, that of 
planning before survey. Our suggestion towards 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 347 

guarding against this is hence of the most definite 
kind, viz. : 

Before proceeding to the preparation of a Town 
Planning Scheme, it is desirable to institute a 
Preliminary Local Survey to include the 
collection and public exhibition of maps, plans, 
models, drawings, documents, statistics, etc., 
illustrative of Situation, Historic Develop- 
ment, Communications, Industry and Com- 
merce, Population, Town Conditions and 
Requirements, etc. 

We desire to bring this practical suggestion before 
local authorities, and also to ventilate it as far as may 
be in public opinion and through the press, and in 
communication to the many bodies whose interest in 
Town Planning Schemes from various points of view 
has been recognised in the Third Schedule of the Act, 
as lately amended by the Government in response to 
representations from our own and other societies. 

111. DANGERS OF TOWN PLANNING BEFORE 
TOWN SURVEY 

What will be the procedure of any community of 
which the local authorities have not as yet adequately 
recognised the need of the full previous consideration 
implied by our proposed inquiry, with its Survey and 
Exhibition? It is that the Town Council, or its 
Streets and Buildings Committee, may simply remit 
to its City Architect, if it has one, more usually to its 



348 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Borough Surveyor or Engineer, to draw up the Town 
Planning Scheme. 

This will be done after a fashion. But too few of 
these officials or of their committees have as yet had 
time or opportunity to follow the Town Planning 
movement even in its publications, much less to know 
it at first hand, from the successes and blunders of 
other cities. Nor do they always possess the many- 
sided preparation geographic, economic, artistic, etc. 
which is required for this most complex of archi- 
tectural problems, one implying, moreover, innumer- 
able social ones. 

If the calling in of expert advice be moved for, the 
Finance Committee of the Town Council, the rate- 
payers also, will tend to discourage the employment 
of an external architect. Moreover, with exceptions, 
still comparatively rare, even the skilled architect, 
however distinguished as a designer of buildings, is 
usually as unfamiliar with town planning as can be 
the town officials ; often, if possible, yet more so. 
For they have at least laid down the existing streets ; 
he has merely had to accept them. 

No doubt, if the plan thus individually prepared 
be so positively bad, in whole or in part, that its 
defects can be seen by those not specially acquainted 
with the particular town or with the quarter in 
question, the L.G.B. can disapprove or modify. 
But even accepting what can be thus done at 
the distance of London, or even by the brief visit 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 349 

from an L.G.B. advisory officer, the real danger 
remains. Not that of streets, etc., absurdly wrong 
perhaps ; but that of the low pass standard that of 
the mass of municipal art hitherto; despite excep- 
tions, usually due to skilled individual initiative. 

Town Planning Schemes produced under this too 
simple and too rapid procedure may thus escape 
rejection by the L.G.B. rather than fulfil the spirit 
and aims of its Act ; and they will thus commit their 
towns for a generation, or irreparably, to designs 
which the coming generation may deplore. Some 
individual designs will no doubt be excellent ; but 
there are not as yet many skilled town planners 
among us. Even in Germany, still more in America 
(despite all recent praise, much of which is justified), 
this new art is still in its infancy. 

As a specific example of failures to recognise 
and utilise all but the most obvious features and 
opportunities of even the most commanding sites, 
the most favourable situations, Edinburgh may be 
chosen. For, despite its exceptional advantages, its 
admired examples of ancient and modern town 
planning, its relatively awakened architects, its com- 
paratively high municipal and public interest in 
town amenity, Edinburgh notoriously presents many 
mistakes, disasters, and even vandalisms, of which 
some are recent ones. If such things happen in 
cities which largely depend upon their attractive 
aspect, and whose town council and inhabitants are 
relatively interested and appreciative, what of towns 



350 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

less favourably situated, less generally aroused to 
architectural interest, to local vigilance and civic 
pride? Even with real respect to the London 
County Council and the record of its individual 
members, past or present, it must be said that this 
is hardly a matter in which London can expect the 
provincial cities to look to her for much light and 
leading as a whole, while her few great and monu- 
mental improvements are naturally beyond their 
reach. 

In short, passable Town Planning Schemes may 
be obtained without this preliminary Survey and 
Exhibition which we desire to see in each town and 
city ; but the best possible cannot be expected. From 
the confused growth of the recent industrial past, 
we tend to be as yet easily contented with any 
improvement : this, however, will not long satisfy 
us, and still less our successors. This Act seeks to 
open a new and better era, and to render possible 
cities which may again be beautiful : it proceeds 
from Housing to Town (Extension) Planning, and 
it thus raises inevitably before each municipality the 
question of town planning at its best in fact of 
city development and city design. 

IV. METHOD AND USES OF PRELIMINARY 
SURVEY 

The needed preliminary inquiry is readily out- 

\ lined. It is that of a City Survey. The whole 

topography of the town and its extensions must be 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 351 

taken into account, and this more fully than in the 
past, by the utilisation not only of maps and plans 
of the usual kind, but of contour maps, and, if 
possible, even relief models. Of soil and geology, 




FIG. 52. Birmingham in 1832, with its Parliamentary boundary (daik line). 

climate, rainfall, winds, etc., maps are also easily 
obtained, or compiled from existing sources. 

For the development of the town in the past, 
historical material can usually be collected without 
undue difficulty. For the modern period, since the 
railway and industrial period have come in, it is easy 
to start with its map on the invaluable " Reform Bill 
Atlas of 1832," and compare with this its plans in 
successive periods up to the present. 



352 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

By this study of the actual progress of town 
developments (which have often followed lines 
different from those laid down or anticipated at 
former periods) our present forecasts of future 
developments may usefully be aided and criticised. 

Means of communication in past and present, and 
in possible future, of course need specially careful 
mapping. 

In this way also appears the need of relating the 
given town not only to its immediate environs, but 
to the larger surrounding region. This idea, though 
as old as geographical science, and though expressed 
in such a term as " County Town," and implicit in 
" Port," " Cathedral City," etc., etc., is in our present 
time only too apt to be forgotten, for town and 
country interests are commonly treated separately 
with injury to both. The collaboration of rustic and 
urban points of view, of county and rural authorities, 
should thus as far as possible be secured, and will be 
found of the greatest value. The recent agricultural 
development in Ireland begins to bring forward the 
need of a more intelligent and practical co-operation 
of town and country than has yet been attempted ; 
and towards this end surveys are beginning, and are 
being already found of value. 

Social surveys of the fulness and detail of Mr 
Booth's well-known map of London may not be 
necessary ; but such broader surveys as those of 
Councillor Marr in his Survey of Manchester, or of 
Miss Walker for Dundee, and the like, represent 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 353 

the very minimum wherever adequate civic better- 
men; is not to be ignored. 

The preparation of this survey of the town's Past 
and Present may usually be successfully undertaken 
in association with the town's library and museum, 
with such help as their curators can readily obtain 
from the town-house, from fellow-citizens acquainted 
with special departments, and, when desired, from the 
Sociological Society's Cities Committee. Experience 
in various cities shows that such a Civic Exhibition 
can readily be put in preparation in this way, and 
without serious expense. 

The urgent problem is, however, to secure a similar 
thoroughness of preparation of the Town Planning 
Scheme which is so largely to determine the future. 

To the Exhibition of the City's Past and Present 
there therefore needs to be added a corresponding 
wall-space (a) to display good examples of town 
planning elsewhere ; (b) to receive designs and 
suggestions towards the City's Future. These may 
be received from all quarters ; some, it may be, 
invited by the municipality, but others independently 
offered, and from local or other sources, both pro- 
fessional and lay. 

In this threefold Exhibition, then of their Borough 
or City, Past, Present, and Possible the municipality 
and the public would practically have the main out- 
lines of the inquiry needful before the preparation 
of the Town Planning Scheme clearly before them ; 

and the education of the public, and of their repre- 

23 



354 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

sentatives and officials alike, may thus and so far as 
yet suggested, thus only be arranged for. Examples 
of town plans from other cities, especially those of 
kindred site or conditions, will here be of peculiarly 
great value, indeed are almost indispensable. 

After this exhibition with its individual contri- 
butions, its public and journalistic discussion, its 
general and expert criticism the municipal authori- 
ties, their officials, and the public are naturally in a 
much more advanced position as regards knowledge 
and outlook from that which they occupy at present, 
or can occupy if the short and easy off-hand method 
above criticised be adopted, obeying only the minimum 
requirements of the Act. The preparation of a Town 
Planning Scheme as good as our present (still limited) 
lights allow, can then be proceeded with. This should 
utilise the best suggestions on every hand, selecting 
freely from designs submitted, and paying for so 
much as may be accepted on ordinary architectural 
rates. 

As the scheme has to be approved by the L.G.B., 
their inspector will have the benefit of the mass of 
material collected in this exhibition, with correspond- 
ing economy of his time and gain to his efficiency. 
His inspection would essentially be on the spot ; any 
critic who may be appointed would naturally require 
to do this. His suggestions and emendations could 
thus be more easily and fully made, and more 
cheerfully adopted. 

The selection of the best designs would be of 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 355 

immense stimulus to individual knowledge and 
invention in this field, and to a worthy civic 
rivalry also. 

j V. OUTLINE SCHEME FOR A CITY SUIIVEY 
AND EXHIBITION 

The incipient surveys of towns and cities, above 
referred to, are already clearly bringing out their local 
individuality in many respects, in situation and 
history, in activities and in spirit. No single scheme 
of survey can therefore be drawn up so as to be 
equally applicable in detail to all towns alike. Yet 
unity of method is necessary for clearness, indis- 
pensable for comparison ; and after the careful study 
of schemes prepared for particular towns and cities, 
a general outline has been drafted, applicable to all 
towns, and easily elaborated and adapted in detail to 
the individuality of each town or city. It is there- 
fore appended, as suitable for general purposes, and 
primarily for that Preliminary Survey previous to the 
preparation of a Town Planning Scheme, which is the 
urgent recommendation of this Committee. 

The survey necessary for the adequate preparation 
of a Town Planning Scheme involves the collection 
of detailed information upon the following heads. 
Such information should be as far as possible in 
graphic form, i.e. expressed in maps and plans 
illustrated by drawings, photographs, engravings, etc., 
with statistical summaries, and with the necessary 
descriptive text ; and is thus suitable for exhibition 



356 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

in town-house, museum, or library ; or, when possible, 
in the city's art galleries. 

The following general outline of the main head- 
ings of such an inquiry admits of adaptation and 
extension to the individuality and special conditions 
of each town and city. 

SITUATION, TOPOGRAPHY, AND NATURAL ADVANTAGES : 

(a) Geology, Climate, Water Supply, etc. 

(b) Soils, with Vegetation, Animal Life, etc. 

(c) River or Sea Fisheries. 

(d) Access to Nature (Sea Coast, etc.). 

MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, LAND AND WATER : 

(a) Natural and Historic. 

(b) Present State. 

(c) Anticipated Developments. 

INDUSTRIES, MANUFACTURES, AND COMMERCE : 

(a) Native Industries. 

(b) Manufactures. 

(c) Commerce, etc. 

(d) Anticipated Developments. 

POPULATION : 

(a) Movement. 
(6) Occupations. 

(c) Health. 

(d) Density. 

(e) Distribution of Well-being (Family Conditions, etc.). 

(f) Education and Culture Agencies. 

(g) Anticipated Requirements. 

TOWN CONDITIONS : 

(a) HISTORICAL : Phase by Phase, from Origins onwards. 
Material Survivals and Associations, etc. 



CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 357 

(b) RECENT : Particularly since 1832 Survey, thus indicating 

Areas, Lines of Growth and Expansion, and Local 
Changes under Modern Conditions, e.g., of Streets, 
Open Spaces, Amenity, etc. 

(c) Local Government Areas (Municipal, Parochial, etc.). 
(<7) PRESENT : Existing Town Plans, in general and detail. 

Streets and Boulevards. 
Open Spaces, Parks, etc. 
Internal Communications, etc. 
Water, Drainage, Lighting, Electricity, etc. 
Housing and Sanitation (of localities in detail). 
Existing activities towards Civic Betterment, both 
Municipal and Private. 

Tow N PLANNING ; SUGGESTIONS AND DESIGNS : 

(A) Examples from other Towns and Cities, British and 

Foreign. 

(B) Contributions and Suggestions towards Town Planning 

Scheme, as regards : 

(a) Areas. 

(b) Possibilities of Town Expansion (Suburbs, etc.). 

(c) Possibilities of City Improvement and Development. 

(d) Suggested Treatments of these in detail (alternatives 

when possible). 

A fuller outline for city activities in detail would 
exceed our present limits ; moreover, it will be found 
to arise more naturally in each city as its survey 
begins, and in course of the varied collaboration which 
this calls forth. The preparation of such more 
detailed surveys is in progress in some of the towns 
above mentioned ; and is well advanced, for instance, 
in Edinburgh and Dublin : and though these surveys 
are as yet voluntary and unofficial, there are indica- 
tions that they may before long be found worthy of 



358 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

municipal adoption. The recent example of the 
corporation of Newcastle-on-Tyne, towards establish- 
ing a Civic Museum and Survey, may here again be 
cited as encouraging, and even predicted as likely 
before long to become typical. 

The question is sometimes asked, How can we, 
in our town or city, more speedily set agoing this 
survey and exhibition without the delay of depending 
entirely on private and personal efforts ? Here the 
services of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition 
may be utilised, as notably in the case of Dublin 
(pp. 258-9). In this way the city's survey is initiated 
in consultation with the local experts of all kinds ; 
and the broad outline thus prepared is capable of later 
local development in detail, with economy of time and 
convenience of comparison with other cities. The 
Exhibition, with its civic surveys from other places, 
is also suggestive and encouraging to local workers : 
while the variety of examples of town planning and 
design from all sources are of course helpful to all 
interested in the preparation of the best possible 
local schemes. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 

After our Civic Survey and Exhibition are undertaken, and the prepara- 
tion of our Town Plan begun, what next ? Each is but a beginning, 
a preparatory study of the city, a draft towards its improvement and 
extension. Both in these ameliorations which are more or less needed 
by all our modern towns at present, and beyond these, we have to 
realise and keep in view the spirit and individuality of our city, 
its personality and character, and to enhance and express this, if 
we would not further efface or repress it. 

How may this spirit be brought out and expressed ? Our survey 
may be helpful to the city's Pageant, beyond this to its more inter- 
pretative Masque, while beyond this again literature and all the arts 
combined must utilise our civics and sociology towards its veritable 
Epic. In every way, then, a School of Civics is needed in every city, 
and in some this is already arising. 

Of the spirit of cities, and the bearing of a perception of this 
towards the discernment of their respective possibilities, concrete 
examples are needed. Single example here chosen for brief and 
partial outline, that of Chelsea Past and Possible. 



may now suppose our Civic Survey has been 
brought up to date, and prepared for planning beyond 
it. It is at any rate in progress, and upon all levels 
of age and responsibility, from primary school and 
college, museum and library, to the town-house itself 
in its various departments ; and thus on many lines 
it is reaching the mass of homes, the body of citizens. 
May we now leave this hard-pressed subject, and 
with confidence that all has been done that need be ? 

359 



360 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Yes and no. The exhibition over, the Town Planning 
Committee (if it has waited so long) may then instruct 
their borough engineer to make out his town plan ; 
but he has doubtless been sketching this out already 
in his own way, well or ill. True, he and his com- 
mittee may now accept from our T'own Planning 
Exhibition what ideas of the city's growth and 
structures and needs their majority permit, or an 
active minority impose ; and thus our trouble will 
not have been wholly wasted. Still, this done, the 
plan, after due correspondence with the L.G.B. and 
adjustment to its criticisms, will obtain official 
approval, and the town's future for a generation (and 
in part for ever) is thus simply settled on ; perhaps 
even proceeded with. 

Yet all we have so far been accumulating are but 
materials towards our history, studies towards our 
picture, drafts towards our design. Of this first 
exhibition it is a main success to have demonstrated 
its own incompleteness : our present documentation 
is but a beginning, and our needed comparisons with 
other cities are little more than broached. 

For all this the practical man will now say he cannot 
wait, and so far rightly ; though he has waited long 
and without complaint before. So while work begins, 
research should continue ; and beyond this, the need 
arises of reconstructive imagination, and this for past, 
for present, and for future alike. 

We visualise and depict our city from its smallest 
beginnings, in its immediate and wider setting, as of 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 361 

valley, river, and routes ; we spread it upon its plain, 
tower it upon its hills, or throne it more spaciously 
by the sea. Our synoptic vision of the city, for each 
and all of its growth-phases, thus ranges through 
region to homes, and back again, and with pictured 
completeness as well as plans : first a rough jewel on 
the breast of Nature, then the wrought clasp upon 
her rich-embroidered garments of forest, vineyard, or 
orchard, of green pastures or golden fields. 

A s with geography, so with history : we design or 
renew the city's pageant, scene by scene. No 
minuteness of local archaeologist and antiquarian can 
be spared, no contact with the outer world of which 
the general historian tells ; yet the main task is too 
commonly missed between these the problem of 
history proper the essential story of the city, the 
presentment of its characteristic life at each period. 
We have to see it as it lived in pre-Roman, Roman, 
and barbarian times, in early and later medieval days, 
and at the Renaissance, as well as in its modern 
industrial growth since the steam-engine and the 
railway. The too purely spectacular pageant of a 
city with its loosely strung succession of incidents, 
themselves too often of external contacts despite its 
splendour, has failed to satisfy the public. But here 
we come in sight of its next development that of 
the more interpretative masque of the city's life ; the 
seven ages, as it were, of its being though happily 
not too closely corresponding to Shakespeare's in- 
dividual ones, themselves sadly degenerate from a 



362 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

nobler tradition. And though at many points our 
masque must still be eked out with pageant, at others 
it may well rise towards epic. Here, in fact, a new 
form of epic begins to appear : that of each and every 
city and region throughout the ages. 

We are thus reaching the very portal of literature ; 
yet, thanks to our outdoor survey and its exhibition, 
we can look back from it upon life, which everywhere 
creates it. We realise for ourselves how this dull 
town has had beauty and youth. We see how it has 
lived through ages of faith and had its great days of 
fellowship ; how it has thrilled to victory, wept in 
defeat, renewed its sacrifices and strifes, and so toiled 
on, through generation after generation, with ever- 
changing fortunes, and in mind and spirit more 
changeful still. But since in the mass of prosperous 
English and American cities we too readily forget 
our historic past, and think only of our town in its 
recent industrial and railway developments, we have 
come to think of this present type of town as in 
principle final, instead of itself in change and flux. 

It is a blind view of history, as something done 
elsewhere and recorded in books instead of being, as 
it is, the very life-process of our city, its heredity and 
its momentum alike which delays the perception of 
civic change among the intelligent, and still retards 
comprehension of it among even the progressive. 
Where even the theologian has too much failed to 
awaken to the current judgment-day, with its 
inexorable punishments, its marvellous rewards, we 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 

cannot wonder that the economist should have been 
slow to realise the limitation of his paleotechnic age ; 
to analyse, yet correlate its complex of evils, its 
poverty- and luxury-diseases, its vices and crimes, its 
ignorances and follies, its apathy and indolence ; or 
conversely, to appreciate and to support its neotechnic 
initiatives and quests. 

From past romancers to modern realists Sir Walter 
to Zola, Reade to Bennett the stuff of literature is 
life ; above all, then, city-life and region-life. Ideas, as 
Bergson rightly teaches, are but sections of life : move- 
ment is of its essence. This life-movement proceeds 
in changing rhythm initiated by the genius of the 
place, continued by the spirit of the times, and accom- 
panied by their good and evil influences. How else 
should we hear in our survey as we go, at one moment 
the muses' song, at another the shriek of furies ! 

Our survey, then, is a means towards the realisation 
of our community's life-history. This life-history is 
not past and done with ; it is incorporated with its 
present activities and character. All these again, plus 
such fresh influences as may arise or intervene, are 
determining its opening future. From our survey of 
facts we have to prepare no mere material record, 
economic or structural, but to evoke the social person- 
ality, changing indeed so far with every generation, 
yet ever expressing itself in and through these. 

Here, in fact, is the higher problem of our surveys, 
and to these the everyday purposes of our previous 
chapters will all be found to converge. He is no true 



364 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

town planner, but at best a too simple engineer, who 
sees only the similarity of cities, their common net- 
work of roads and communications. He who would 
be even a sound engineer, doing work to endure, let 
alone an artist in his work, must know his city indeed, 
and have entered into its soul as Scott and Stevenson 
knew and loved their Edinburgh ; as Pepys and 
Johnson and Lamb, as Besant and Gomme their 
London. Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Harvard, 
have peculiarly inspired their studious sons ; but 
Birmingham and Glasgow, New York or Chicago, 
have each no small appeal to observant and active 
minds. In every city there is much of beauty and 
more of possibility ; and thus for the town planner 
as artist, the very worst of cities may be the best. 

Hence at the end of this long volume we are but 
at the beginning of the study of cities in evolution. 
We should now pass through a representative selection 
of cities. We need to search out sociological inter- 
pretations of all these unique developments ; indeed 
it is for lack of such concrete inquiries that sociology 
has been so long marking time, between anthropology 
and metaphysics, and with no sufficient foothold in 
social life as it is lived to-day in cities. We need 
to search into the life of city and citizen, and the 
inter-relation of these, and this as intensively as the 
biologist inquires into the interaction of individual 
and race in evolution. Only thus can we adequately 
handle the problems of social pathology ; and hence 
again rise to the hope of cities, and with clearer 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 365 

beginnings of civic therapeutics, of social hygiene. 
In such ways, and through such studies, the incipient 
civic renascence is proven to be no mere utopia ; 
and its needed policy may be more clearly discerned, 
even devised. Thus we return, upon a new spiral, 
to town planning as City Design. City by city our 
civic ideals emerge and become definite ; and in the 
revivance of our city we see how to work towards its 
extrication from its paleotechnic evils, its fuller en- 
trance upon the better incipient order. Education 
and industry admit of reorganisation together, towards 
sound mind and vigorous body once more. This 
unification of idealistic feeling and of constructive 
thought with practical endeavour, of civic ethics and 
group-psychology with art, yet with economics, is 
indeed the planning of Eutopia of practical and 
practicable Eutopias, city by city. Such, then, is the 
vital purpose of all our surveys : and though their 
completion must be left to others, fresh chapters for 
city after city indeed sometimes a volume for each 
might here be added, with their Surveys, of things 
as they are and as they change, passing into Reports, 
towards things as they may be. 

Every town planner is indeed moving in this 
direction more or less ; no one will now admit him- 
self a mere procrustean engineer of parallelograms, 
or mere draughtsman of perspectives ; but long and 
arduous toil and quest are still before us ere we can 
really express, as did the builders of old, the spirit of 
our cities. Spiritually, artistically we are but in the 



366 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

day of small things, however big be our material 
responsibilities. Hence the justification of the inner 
rooms of our Outlook Tower, and of the Cities and 
Town Planning Exhibition, with their drafts, sketches, 
and sometimes beginnings towards the realisable 
Eutopia of cities, as of Edinburgh and Dunfermline, 
of Chelsea or Dundee, of Dublin or Madras. 

Through such large civic endeavours as that of the 
town planning of Dublin, this correlation of Survey 
and Eutopia may be made plainer to other cities ; 
and this as appealing to all parties, classes, occupa- 
tions, and individuals. In such ways city surveys 
and exhibitions and plans are actually generating 
a new movement of education, that towards a School 
of Civics, as in Dublin, and soon in every city. How 
this might be helped by school and college, by studio, 
gallery, and library, has been fully suggested already : 
but now it may be plainer that it may help these in 
turn. For what is a Civic Exhibition if not a fresh 
step towards the Civic University ; and with this 
towards the City Renewed ? 

Without such increasing, deepening, and generally 
diffusing realisation of the character and spirit of our 
city, our town planning and improvement schemes 
are at best but repeating (though no doubt in better 
form and upon a further spiral) those " bye-law 
streets " with which the past generation was too easily 
content, but with which we are now becoming so 
thoroughly disenchanted, as but slums after all, and 
in some ways the worse for being standardised. 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 367 

At this point more than ever we require concrete 
illustrations, and these from city after city. But 
space forbids : for, say, Edinburgh or Dublin alone 
one would need this whole volume and more : indeed, 
for the far smaller and necessarily less complex Dun- 
fermline, the writer has already found a doubly 
crowded one insufficient. 

Still, some example must be given, though of the 
briefest. As a mere indication of the fields of inquiry 
and of reflection needed to disengage the spirit of 
a city, and of the forecasts, initiatives, and endeavours 
which even a glimpse of this spirit will awaken, as the 
School of Civics in any city or borough works and 
grows, may be submitted the following brief and 
much abridged sketch towards opening a discussion 
of Chelsea Past and Possible. 

The exploration of Chelsea is crowded with 
interest, full of significance ; and detailed instructions 
for setting about this, in ramble after ramble, are to 
be found in no mere summary as of Baedeker, but in 
the admirable guide-book of Mr Reginald Blunt. 

Chelsea Church and its memorials, Church Street 
and its associations, are more or less known to every 
Chelsean, and so with each of our main assets. But 
it is easy to undervalue the secondary ones ; thus the 
reverent visitor of the Old Church often passes by 
the new Parish Church with utter indifference, if not 
with a remark upon the tameness of its modern 
Gothic. Yet this is one of the notable buildings not 



368 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

only of the borough but of the nineteenth century, 
since it is the first modern church with a stone- 
vaulted roof that is, the first real attempt to con- 
struct a Gothic edifice since the close of the Middle 
Ages. No wonder it is not completely satisfactory ; 
it is rather a wonder it is so good ; and even if we 
may no longer feel our fathers' enthusiasm for modern 
Gothic, we see that this edifice has none the less its 
place, and that an initiative one, in one of the in- 
fluential movements of recent history. 

Even in the nooks of Chelsea, in its retreats from 
the general stream of local and national life, we find 
points ranging from individual interest to world sig- 
nificance, to history in its largest aspects, temporal 
and spiritual. Thus the Cavalier associations of 
Chelsea are familiar to all its citizens ; but from 
Lindsey House, once Count Zinzendorf s chateau, it 
is but a step in thought to the Thirty Years' War 
and from the quiet little Moravian meeting-house 
with its austere cemetery, to one of the greatest and 
best of Puritan movements in history. Even their 
tiny disused schoolhouse, dingy though it be, is more 
than a mere surviving landmark for progress. It has 
a tradition of its own, older than that of any of our 
schools and colleges, than those of South Kensington 
to boot ; for among the educators of history there 
are few more significant and perhaps none at this 
moment more vividly modern, more directly indica- 
tive of the twofold needs of progress of sciences and 
humanities together, than the Moravian pedagogue 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 369 

and bishop Comenius, author of the Orbis Pictus, 
yet also of the Pilgrimage of the Soul. 

Our historic houses are well known. There Turner 
spent his last year and died, there Rossetti, there 
Whistler, and each after revolutionising his generation. 
Fill in minor names, at least of the thirty mighty 
men who attain not unto the first three say, from 
Cecil Lawson onwards and back and see what a 
wealth of artistic associations. Here in our own day 
are more painters than ever, and though none be a 
prophet in his own borough, and the old excellences 
be gone, new excellences are surely appearing. We 
may regret the vanishing of the old Pottery with its 
dainty figures ; but we have now in progress, and in 
more studios than we can number, the expression of 
a higher idealism, of a more varied realism than that 
of old, upon a far greater scale and in more enduring 
forms. It is time to recognise that even now our 
Chelsea sculptors are initiating an Art movement 
which may before long be recognised throughout 
the land as not less vital and significant in its way 
than those of the great painters we are wont here 
to recall. 

In Chelsea (and in More's garden of all places) 
our local memories of the Renaissance are not likely 
to be forgotten, nor how the advent of the New 
Learning in England would have had a far less easy 
progress but for the convinced and persuasive ally 
whom Erasmus found in the hospitable Chancellor. 
But hardly less significant, though less remembered, 



370 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

is the later, yet completer development (since in- 
cluding also the scientific movement of the later 
Renaissance), which we owe to More's successor 
in the same home and neighbourhood, Sir Hans 
Sloane. Many beyond Chelsea know his Botanic 
Garden ; but it is sometimes forgotten that to 
his collection the British Museum itself owes its 
origin; and more often forgotten still how stately 
and generous was Sloane's design for had that 
been carried out, his historic mansion would even 
now be in existence ; and this as the centre of 
the nation's treasure-houses, not crowded out of 
sight in Bloomsbury, but displayed like the Louvre, 
perhaps indeed better, in park as well as on river. 
Hence, perhaps through the inward fitness of 
things, a vast group of museums has returned to 
our immediate neighbourhood ; so that we need 
now no longer refuse morally to incorporate into 
at least the outer court of our sacred enclosure 
South Kensington itself, albeit so long the mere 
hinterland of Chelsea. 

This tracing of traditions, as all Chelseans, all 
historians know, might be continued and amplified. 
I need not even speak of the local record in literature, 
in criticism, in affairs ; it is time to draw to our 
conclusions. First, that we are here well on in the 
fourth century of a focus of thought, a cloister of 
meditation, a centre of learning, a creative home of 
art, and, above all these, a radiant centre of moral 
and social idealism, arising in the joyous sunburst 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 371 

of the Utopia, but never wholly dying away. To 
recall once more only a few of the greater names of 
Chelsea, who can doubt but that this local association 
of imagination and humour since More, and since 
Erasmus's Encomium Morice, must have stirred 
in turn the passionate imagination, the fierce humour 
of Swift, and the heroic visions, the blazing satire of 
Carlyle. Or, again, after these first three, has not 
the same Utopian tradition aroused the generous 
ardour of Kingsley ? and strengthened the lucid 
optimism of Thomas Davidson ? whose whilom 
Chelsea Brotherhood has grown into what has 
been one of the most potent groups of Utopians 
of our day and generation, the Fabian Society ; 
and whose later teaching is so manifest in that 
renaissance of educational and civic idealism which 
withstands the omnipotence of mammon even in 
New York. 

Next, our civic conclusion. Here in Chelsea, albeit 
one of the minor boroughs of London as regards 
area, wealth, population, and other crude quantitative 
measurements, we have a city in its own way second 
to none, and in general view claiming to be reckoned 
after the City and Westminster themselves as making 
up the main triad of Central London. True, the 
City stood for commerce, for material wealth, financial 
greatness, and Westminster for sacred traditions and 
for governing powers, when this was but a country 
village. Yet when the Reformation closed the story 
of Westminster as a medieval cloister of thought, the 



372 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

history of Chelsea opened ; as in its turn the cloister- 
city of ideals, those of the Renaissance. Since then 
it has afforded, once and again, a needed subjective 
counterpart to the material and political greatness 
of the two metropolitan cities. This position, in 
Chelsea but individually and sporadically realised, 
has been more fully and more consciously taken as 
well as educationally applied by Oxford ; but while 
that has been mainly a citadel of the causes and 
ideals of the past, the record of Chelsea lies essentially 
in its initiatives, of new ideals, of constructive move- 
ments. Here in fact has long been established, not 
indeed More's " Utopia," yet another and practically 
contemporary one, that "Abbey of Thelema" in 
which each lives his own life to such purpose as 
he may. 

Our record of local history and achievement is no 
mere retrospect of sporadic genius, but a perpetual 
renewal of certain recognisable elements. Though 
to historians and their readers the past may too often 
seem dead, a record to be enshrined in libraries for 
the learned, it is of the very essence of our growing 
sociological re-interpretation of the past to see its 
essential life as continuous into the present, and even 
beyond, and so to maintain the perennation of culture, 
the immortality of the social soul. The definition of 
culture in terms of " the best that has been known 
and done in the world " is but half the truth, that 
which mourns or meditates among the tombs ; the 
higher meaning of culture is also nearer its primitive 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 373 

sense, which finds in the past not only fruit but seed, 
and so prepares for a coming spring, a future harvest. 
History is not ended with our historian's "periods"; 
the world is ever beginning anew, each community 
with it, each town and quarter. Why not, then, also 
this small town of ours, this most productive cloister 
of thought and art in what is now the vastest of 
historic cities ? 

How, then, shall we continue the past tradition into 
the opening future ? that is now the problem of 
Eutopia. A civic union, a Chelsea Association, has 
for years past been struggling into existence ; and 
may yet unite our scattered endeavours and feelings 
after more active citizenship, and this in no mere 
limited sense, of gas and drains and taxes. We are 
surely as capable here of aspiring to more Athenian 
ideals of Citizenship as to cultural efforts, like our 
recent pageanting, our arts balls, our marvellous 
flower-shows. Why not also a more associated yet 
correspondingly more individual life ? We have the 
tradition of many culture-activities, the essentials of 
a University City in the general sense ; for as the 
community in its religious aspect was the Church, as 
the community in its political aspect is the State, so 
also the community in its cultural aspect will be the 
University. Here and beside us, moreover, in our 
own day, has been developing a university quarter 
in the literal sense ; why not now bring these two 
beginnings together? Might not that be a fresh 
impulse to ourselves in Chelsea and why not one of 



374 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



value to London by and by as at once to its 
University, which has its collegiate growth before it ? 
Towards all this, the re-erection of Crosby Hall, well- 
nigh the last surviving relic of Old London, upon 




FIG. 53. Crosby Hall, Chelsea : rebuilt in 1909-10 for University Hall 
of residence. 

More's garden, is no mere act of archaeological piety, 
still less of mere " restoration," but one of renewal ; 
it is a purposeful symbol, a renewed initiative, Utopian 
and local, civic and academic in one. It is first of 
all a renewed link with the past and its associations ; 
it is also of daily uses, both public and collegiate ; 



THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 375 

and these above all as preparing the future, not simply 
dignifying the present and commemorating tl>e past. 
Here, then, is a new link between Chelsea Past and 
Chelsea Possible ; a centre at once studious and 
practical, uniting thought and action, civic retrospect 
and civic future. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 

Criticism of preceding treatment of Chelsea, and its answer : correspond- 
ing yet divergent development of other cities with neotechnic 
progress ; a hopeful augury. 

How far can housing and town planning be considered as a 
business proposition ? Or how far must these depend on political 
action? Main steps of past progress have not simply been on 
either line. As so often with other advances, they have involved 
initial idealism, costly to their promoters, yet in time have become 
economic, as of course may public action also. Example from 
Irish Agricultural movement : better housing, better living, better 
business. 

Constructive Consols, and other incipient elements of Social 
Finance : opening promise of this. 

Civics and Eugenics : their necessary association. Cities in 
Evolution with people in Evolution. 

OF the suggestion towards the development of 
Chelsea with which the previous chapter closed, the 
criticism may be made that this was but a poor 
example, since too academic to be of much general 
interest. To this there are several answers. First, 
that one may best speak of what one knows, and has 
worked at : second, that even in our existing order 
there are cities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St 
Andrews, to which the university is a main asset, 
and more to which it is a not inconsiderable secondary 
one : third, that as neotechnic culture advances, 
wealth more and more takes the form of educating 

376 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 377 

the younger generation towards skill and efficiency, 
and this of many kinds ; and that this can and must 
go on, till higher education and specialised skill 
become common instead of rare. Again, that the 
obviously associated and already not inconsider- 
able higher industries, such as printing, etc., must 
naturally increase ; and so on. Yet even for Chelsea 
the suggested collegiate development was but one 
among several important elements also more or less 
capable of increase, as notably its eminent horti- 
cultural tradition and present efficiency, or yet more 
its two thousand artists. So, for Edinburgh again ; 
we might readily enter the current discussion of its 
industrial future, as to which there are two fairly 
distinct schools the first simply clamouring to Jove 
for "new industries," of any or every sort (and not 
getting them) ; the second more disposed to con- 
sider the whole situation the existing place, work, 
and people, with their existing advantages and 
aptitudes, limitations and possibilities; and thence 
thinking out the further development and better 
correlation of these. The same inquiry seems more 
urgent for Dundee ; more urgent still for Dublin ; 
. and so on ; yet the lines of development most 
promising will be found to be largely different, 
indeed this increasingly as our surveys and studies 
of these cities grow more and more clear. Even 
for purposes of strictly economic development (if 
strict economic development there be) the paleo- 
technic view of cities, as nowadays broadly similar, 



378 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and with their differing pasts alike practically 
negligible, turns out on examination to be deeply 
unpractical, wasteful, and unproductive; and that 
the future developments of cities will be again upon 
lines of divergence and neotechnic differentiation, 
may be boldly affirmed. Town-plan and " industrial 
brief " are thus in Dublin progressing simultaneously. 
Here, in fact, is a great and opening field for civic 
statesmanship in association with civic sociology ; and 
it may be fairly hoped that as these advance together 
their substantial fruit may become as manifest as that 
of the association of wise practice with sound theory 
on simpler levels of science, both pure and applied ; 
while of the superior spiritual fruit there can surely 
be no question. Hence Edinburgh is not permanently 
destined to professional fossilisation, legal and other ; 
Dundee need not accept ruin by Oriental compe- 
tition at the lowest level of subsistence ; Dublin will 
not further subside into squalor, nor Belfast into 
bitterness ; but each and all revive, through fuller 
appreciation of their respective possibilities and 
cultivation of their advantages, and towards com- 
pleter and higher inter-civic co-operation. 

But it is time to return to the more simple and 
immediate problems of the present volume ; and to 
make at least some beginning of an answer to the 
questions the reader may once and again have been 
asking. How far can all these fine things of housing 
and town planning survive ? how can they be made 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 379 

to pay ? are they to be considered as a business pro- 
position, or are they not ? Let us see. 

It is not a little significant to note that the various 
steps of housing progress above indicated (in Chapter 
VII.) have not arisen automatically, as so many 
natural and profitable developments one from another 
on ordinary economic lines ; nor yet as political 
advances ; though these are the two alternatives 
between which most modern minds are confined, 
even of those who desire further housing and city im- 
provement. The actual development has not been so 
simple. Each main advance has arisen with outcry 
or protest against the prevalent state of things ; and 
has developed from dreams and schemes which have 
invariably aroused counter-protest and outcry, those 
of "unpractical" and "Utopian." Yet these "un- 
practical dreams " have none the less become resolve 
and effort, and those " Utopian schemes " have de- 
veloped with the toil and sacrifices of some one or 
two or more, but at first few individuals. It is 
time that this history of pioneering were adequately 
written, for it is still needed to arouse our cities and 
our fellow-citizens to day. But here can only be set 
down a few notes and suggestions. Among the first 
who attempted the arousal and uplift of the paleo- 
techriic city from its complacent progress into squalid 
overcrowding, and this appropriately in Glasgow, 
we must recall Dr Chalmers with his "Christian 
Economy of Cities " ; as also his practical endeavours, 



380 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

from one of which, for instance, what is now known 
as " the Elberfeld system " was directly derived. 
Within the same industrial region of the Clyde, 
Robert Owen's rare union of speculative and practical 
endeavours for a time exercised a world-influence, as 
has been recalled in Mr Podmore's recent biography. 
As among the foremost pioneers of labour betterment 
through legislation, Lord Shaftesbury's strenuous 
life story has also been well told. As Owen was 
Communist, so Godin was a Fourierist. Carlyle was 
himself for a time half St Simonian, and his vigorous 
attacks upon the futilitarian economists and paleo- 
technic order generally, as, for single instance, on 
" Hudson's Statue," were continued by Kingsley, 
our English Lamennais, and later by Ruskin, who 
was also largely aroused by Sismondi ; and all these 
idealists have aided the growing disillusionment, the 
still slower reconstruction, long though these have 
been of coming, and still imperfect though they be. 
Octavia Hill's work for housing arose too in factor- 
ship for Ruskin as her first property owner ; and his 
" St George's Guild," though unsuccessful, was none 
the less a project whose ideas and ideals are still 
suggestive. 

Return to the early hygienists, Simon, Parkes, and 
others, whom we have to thank for pure water, public 
cleansing, domestic sanitation, and the lowered death- 
and disease-rates which these imply ; and consider 
what idealism carried them on for their generation of 
ardent toil, through towns of material filth and 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 



381 



grime unparalleled in history ; and against apathy 
and opposition even denser. So even the decent dul- 
ness of our bye-law streets expresses more idealistic 
efforts against heavy odds than we nowadays re- 
member ; while of the succession of model tenements 
and improving suburbs and artisan villages the philan- 




FIG. 54. Small garden village, utilising picturesque situation at Roseburn on 
Water of Leith, towards outskirts of Edinburgh. An early endeavour, in 
pi ogress since 1892. 

thro pic endeavours have been already mentioned. 
Ebenezer Howard with his Garden City is thus but a 
culminating type of this long succession of practical 
Eutopists ; while his faithful band of Garden Cities 
Association shareholders, who, like all other true 
experimentalists, have waited years for the modest 
dividend only at length beginning, must also not be 
forgotten. 

Yet the torch must ever be kept alight and passed 



382 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

on, if we would not lapse anew, as has so often 
happened already ; as, for instance, after what was in 
its day the no less world-wide renown and influence 
of Robert Owen. True, the torch is now in the hands 
of a hundred architects and town planners ; and, after 
finding its first statesman in John Burns, it is now 
and henceforth a matter of practical politics. Yet 
" all things achieved and chosen pass " ; and in matters 
of housing and town planning, even more literally 
than in others, we have no continuing city. What, 
then, of further ideals and ideas do we still require ? 

Are better housing and town planning, then, always 
to remain enterprises of idealism and sacrifice, or are 
they settling down to solid business and profitable 
return ? In short, will they pay ? And how ? As- 
suredly yes, as there are yearly more dividend-paying 
concerns to show Co-operative Tenants doubtless 
for choice, but many others as well. It is as with 
Sir Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural movement : 
there are, and always must be, idealists at the front, 
with little or nothing beyond their trouble for material 
reward ; but what they have sown, others already 
reap. Plunkett's watchword, of " better farming, 
better business, better living," though for a time 
incredulously sneered at, now appeals to the Irish 
peasant by tens of thousands : so why should not 
" better housing, better living, better business " appeal 
even more widely in its turn, since true for townsfolk 
everywhere ? 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 



383 



True, there are none of the brilliant inducements 
of a really popular City prospectus of the familiar 
paleotechnic type, with its fluent promises of great 



EALI71C TE?!A^T5 LDIITLD. 

E5TATE. 
EALI?IC. 




- GCocres 
HOUSES ~10 per acn 
RENTS -e|0d*>Clj1 



owe !<***$* 



FIG. 55. Ealing Co-operative Tenants, Ltd.: Example of a progressive develop- 
ment, from conventional "bye-law streets" in 1901-2 to garden village type 
at its best in 1911. (The growth has been from right to left.) 

and speedy returns to investors, and its promoters' 
too frequent performance, of division of their spoil. 
In sound and steady agriculture, no man makes speedy 
fortune, be he labourer, farmer, or squire ; and but 
few ;my fortune to speak of: yet each looks to have 



384 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

congenial and honourable occupation, with healthy 
home, and effective family ; each leaves the land 
better than he found it ; and so in every way helps to 
make the nation's fortune, and this at its best, place 
and people together. In short, then, he has a liveli- 
hood, which is at the same time a life. So precisely 
it should be with bricklayer and builder, architect and 
planner : in the past it has been so ; and already it 
sometimes is (paleotechnic housing - scandals and 
building-disputes notwithstanding). As country and 
town are in these ways maintained, renewed, im- 
proved, real wealth steadily increases, and in ways 
far more material than those of the " City," with its 
financial Utopias, its pecuniary notations, so largely of 
debts and dreams. 

The dawning economic practice and theory of the 
neotechnic city thus recalls that of the old physiocrats, 
upon its modern spiral ; but this does not delay the 
working out of new and appropriate forms of finance. 
Constructive Consols, as we may fairly call such grow- 
ing schemes as government building-loans, are an 
obvious beginning of this ; and their development 
affords no small opportunity for the Treasury, at 
present and for a generation to come. The principle 
of organisation and growth of an agricultural bank 
remains a mystery to the true " City " mind, often too 
sunk in the cult of personal gain to grasp even the 
possibility, let alone the rationality and the prosperity 
of such banks everywhere, with their awakening of 
social solidarity towards the constructive rural uses 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 385 




[HARTOIN VI L,LA.- ESTATE PROpoSEO HOUSES 



'""" ? J 



FT- 



U^-ESTATE 



PL&N OF MPROVEMENTS ON 
GROUND BW8TLY DEVELOPED ON 
OLDER CONVENTIONS LINE3- 




i; 



II 



My 




FIG. 56. Harton Estate, South Shields. Example of changes from conventional 
plan and lay-out of former years ; type easily adaptable to bye- law streets 
anywhere. 



386 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

of capital. But as the reorganisation of cities becomes 
seen as an urgent and vital line of policy (as already 
in Dublin), the banker must either adapt such methods 
to urban use, devise better ones, or give place to better 
bankers who can. The Civic Bank is coming, and the 
Civic Trust might here be enlarged on as by far the 
brightest inspiration of Mr Carnegie's many philan- 
thropic endeavours. In fact new forms of socialised 
finance without number, and all in friendly co- 
operation and rivalry towards the common weal. All 
this social finance is of course not simply a matter of 
sentiment (though that is needed to win battles), but 
of science also, and with new types of bank directors 
accordingly the engineer and physicist with their 
economy of energies, the hygienist with his economy 
of life, the planner with his economy of cities. In 
paleotechnic finance, the financier with his " credit " 
reigns supreme, and lends where the immediate return 
is highest and more and more without a thought of 
social results ; the accountant, that public analyst of 
industry and commerce, is but the doctor who looks 
after him, if not, as sometimes, the detective. But as 
neotechnic activities and experience advance, we 
constructive workers will increasingly discern that 
financial resources, and credit too, are essentially of 
our own making ; and that the banker, whom we 
accordingly need, is above all the clear and statesman- 
like accountant of our complex mutual co-operation 
and division of labour on the creation of the city's 
wealth as weal. 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 387 

After so much sentiment of cities, so much talk of 
the future, is it still needful to answer the " practical " 
paleotect who is convinced that " sentiment doesn't 
pay," that " human nature is fixed " (in his image), 
and so on ? But the future is already here, as plainly 
as are next spring's buds ; and though he may prob- 
ably never have noticed these either, that blindness 
will not prevent their opening. This eutopian, con- 
structive, and neotechnic reorganisation of industry, 
in city and country alike, is shaping, on plan and 
in place alike ; it is even beginning to survive against 
the paleotechnic confusion, and this in terms of 
its own doctrine, that of struggle for existence, 
and survival of the fitter ; in this case the more 
socially and vitally organised. To turn wheels for 
hire as labourer, and to turn pence for profit as a 
capitalist, has no doubt been going on so long, and in 
such large crowds, as to hypnotise their members 
from seeing what better things are now waiting to 
be done, and how much more life as well as livelihood 
may be had from doing them. But let those laugh 
who win : will it not here be those of direct mind 
who are set on making better homes and surroundings 
for wife and weans, and thus get them more speedily ? 
Not those of indirect mind, who at best set out 
towards these better conditions through money- wages 
or profits ; and have thus been going on for genera- 
tions in bad or worse conditions for all their pains. 

Along with the coming in of civics we shall have 
that of social finance, based on the creation of real 



388 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and material securities, but with it individual and 
family survival, and this in increasing health. Here, 
then, we have come to eugenics : and this eugenics 
proper, free from those elements of fatalism, of crude 
Darwinism, if not reactionary sophistry, which from 
time to time reappear to discourage the uplift of the 
people with the improvement of their conditions. 

The idea of Civics and Eugenics in association, and 
no longer studied apart, as separate specialisms, nor 
advocated as if they were rival panaceas, might well 
occupy a new chapter. Suffice it, however, to state 
two or three main points of experience and conviction 
without here arguing them. First, that many of those 
whom eugenists are apt to think of and to tabulate 
as " degenerates " in type and stock are really but 
deteriorates, and this in correspondence to their 
depressive environment. Next, that such types and 
stocks, which our wholesale paleotechnic experiment 
of slum-culture has proved most sensitive or adaptive 
to its evils, should correspondingly no less respond to 
better conditions, and thus rise above average, as 
they now fall below. These are not, of course, new 
hypotheses : they are doctrines experimentally con- 
firmed throughout history, and at least as old as the 
gospels and prophecies, which (even their exponents 
seem sometimes to forget) came largely to express 
them. The only freshness of treatment now possible 
(apart from the greatness of the scale of endeavour 
that slum and super-slum provide) is to restate these 
doctrines, independently of feeling or tradition ; and 



ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 389 

this in the teeth of the crudely Darwinian eugenists 
above referred to, and on fuller scientific grounds than 
theirs, biological, psychological, and social, and of 
observation, experiment, and reasoning alike ; and to 
appeal for that fuller experiment accordingly, which 
no scientific antagonist can fairly refuse. Added 
arguments may appeal to different outlooks ; to some 
the economy of hospitals and asylums, of board 
schools, public schools, and barracks, of reformatories, 
police courts, and prisons, and so on ; and to others 
that of sport and gambling, of drink-shops and vice- 
shops ; and to others again of the lower press, of the 
idling-clubs, of the bureaucratic institutions, and of 
course of the professions, all, though variously, con- 
cerned with the preceding. A complemental line of 
argument is also to be derived from the moral or 
material values and productivities of individuals and 
stocks thus transplanted in course of civic and 
regional renewal. 

If further economic considerations be desired, one 
more may be offered, and with no less confidence and 
emphasis. Recall for the last time our too largely 
paleotechnic working-towns with their ominous 
contrasts of inferior conditions for the labouring 
majority, with comfort and luxury too uninspiring at 
best for the few. Contrast again, with these working- 
towns, the deeper and more deteriorating correlation 
of the crude and crowded luxury of the great spend- 
ing-towns, with the yet more deteriorative labour- 
conditions which such luxury so especially cultivates 



390 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



^- ^,- - 




ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 



391 



and increases. In both these predominant types of our 
modern community the conditions are thus tending 
towards deterioration deterioration obviously more 
comprehensive and complex than that which military 
recruiting statistics so tragically express. Hence the 




FIG. 58. The contemporary renewal of Dublin : design for seal of Civics 
Institute (the body promoting Dublin Civic Exhibition of 1914). 

Housing and Town Planning movement must at all 
costs be speedily advanced, our existing cities, towns, 
and villages improved, with new garden villages and 
suburbs where need be, and small garden cities as far 
as possible. This vast national movement of re- 
construction must be faced, were it but to create 
the needful sanatoria of our paleotechnic civilisation ; 
but, happily, it is also superior in productive efficiency 
and survival value in itself, and thus demonstrable by 



392 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

the accountant and banker as he escapes from the 
city and learns his work. Healthy life is completeness 
of relation of organism, function, and environment, 
and all at their best. Stated, then, in social and civic 
terms, our life and progress involve the interaction 
and uplift of people with work and place, as well as of 
place and work with people. Cities in Evolution and 
People in Evolution must thus progress together. 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 

WE set out in the first chapter to effect our escape 
from the current abstractions of economics and politics 
in which we all more or less alike have been brought 
up : and we returned to the concrete study, from 
which politics and social philosophy actually arose in 
the past, but have too much wandered that of cities 
as we find them, or rather as we see them grow. To 
recognise the present-day growth of our cities, their 
spreading and their pressure into new and vaster 
groupings or conurbations, and to realise these as 
vividly as may be, first upon the map of our island, 
and then as it is also discernible abroad, was the 
cont inued endeavour of the next tw r o chapters. Thus 
there emerged the conception of the intersocial 
struggle for existence, as dependent no longer mainly, 
as so many suppose, upon the issues of international 
war. nor even as pacifists assume, upon the mainten- 
ance of the present stage of industry at its present 
level, by amicable negotiations. Peace and prosperity 
depend above all upon our degree of civic efficiency, 
and upon the measure in which a higher phase of 
industrial civilisation may be attained in different 
regions and by their civic communities. 



394 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

Thus we came, in Chapter IV., to the criticism of 
the too loosely expressed, too vaguely described " In- 
dustrial Age " of our historians and economists ; and 
to its analysis into two main phases, rude and fine, 
old and new, Paleotechnic and Neotechnic ; with 
conclusions frankly critical of our modern towns, as 
still predominantly paleotechnic, though not without 
the initiatives of the higher phase, nor the means of 
advancing into it more and more fully. 

Yet the conditions which delay our acceptance of 
the neotechnic order are not to be dealt with too 
simply. Instead, therefore, of our deducing from 
these considerations some simple policy, to be debated 
and adopted forthwith, as is the method of politics, the 
need was urged of arousing observation and extend- 
ing it, of knowing our regions and cities in detail, 
and of making ourselves more competent practically 
to share in the arousal and development of our own 
home-city, instead of merely deputing our responsi- 
bilities to others through the political or municipal 
voting apparatus. 

There conveniently follows here a chapter (VIII.) 
on Housing ; and this especially as culminating in 
the Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, which have 
been the best contribution of London and of England 
generally to the advance of civilisation and well-being 
during the present century, indeed within the memory 
or life-time of the generation now maturing, and 
passing on its impulse. 

Towards meeting this need of civic knowledge and 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 395 

comparison, travel is far more interesting and in- 
structive to begin with than can be any more abstract 
discussion. Hence the chapters ( I X.-XI. ) summaris- 
ing notes of a recent and typical Town Planning Tour 
in Germany ; Germany being selected not as the 
country of late years popularly 7 viewed as the most 
alarming of business competitors, or of naval rivals, 
but as the region of Europe whose civic progress 
and development have been most instructive to her 
neighbours, and from which impulses to the British 
and American Town Planning movement have been 
as yet most largely derived. 

[n the accumulation of experience, from foreign 
travel or from observation at home, all may share ; 
notes and impressions may be accumulated ; pictures, 
plans, models, and other graphic records may be 
pooled together. Thus there gradually arise Town 
Planning Collections, and from these again Town 
Planning Exhibitions. These were first initiated in 
Germany ; but are now also being held in this and 
other countries, witness the " Cities and Town Plan- 
ning Exhibition" now upon its rounds through 
various cities. In its growing mass, orderly depart- 
ments differentiate, and sections of these arise ; so 
that the various contributors and organisers are fairly 
on the road towards thoroughness for each division 
of the field. In short, increase of expert knowledge, 
accumulation of its necessary material for comparison, 
reference, and illustration, are going on ; and these 
together with a wide and growing appeal to the 



396 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

public. In city after city there is being aroused a 
new interest in its historic and social past, a fresh 
criticism of the advantages and defects of its present 
state, and a discussion of the possibilities of its im- 
provement and development. 

At this stage City Improvement and Town Plan- 
ning comprehensively appear ; yet in face of so much 
tradition of the past, so many suggestions from the 
contemporary world, a new danger arises, that of 
imitating what we admire, too irrespective of its 
differences from our own place, time, or manner of 
life. We are satiated with the existing medley our 
cities show of pseudo-classical or feebly romantic 
buildings, supposed to revive the past, and of the 
mean streets or conventional villa suburbs, which repre- 
sent the limitations of their builders. Yet the piercing 
of characterless perspectives and boulevards through 
this past confusion or beyond it, which would seem 
to satisfy too many town planners, or the endeavours 
of too many schemes to repeat here, there, and 
everywhere bits of Letchworth or Hampstead 
Suburb (excellent as these are in their own place and 
way) are but poor examples of Town Planning ; in 
fact, they are becoming fresh delays and new obstacles 
to City Design. 

True Rustic Development, true Town Planning, 
true City Design, have little in common with these too 
cheap adaptations or copies. On pain of economic 
waste, of practical failure no less than of artistic 
futility, and even worse, each true design, each valid 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 397 

scheme should and must embody the full utilisation 
of its local and regional conditions, and be the ex- 
pression of local and of regional personality. " Local 
character" is thus no mere accidental old-world 
quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is 
attained only in course of adequate grasp and treat- 
ment of the whole environment, and in active 
sympathy with the essential and characteristic life 
of the place concerned. Each place has a true 
personality ; and with this shows some unique 
elements a personality too much asleep it may be, 
but which it is the task of the planner, as master- 
artist, to awaken. And only he can do this who is 
in love and at home with his subject truly in love 
and fully at home the love in which high intuition 
supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest 
intensity of expression, to call forth the latent but 
not less vital possibilities before him. Hence our 
plea for a full and thorough survey of country and 
town, village and city, as preparatory to all town 
planning and city design ; and thus as being for the 
opening neotechnic order (see our initial population- 
map) all that the geological survey has been for 
paleotechnic cities ; indeed far more. 

Indications towards orderly methods of preliminary 
survey are therefore offered ; for museum and library, 
school and college, city and its authorities, which the 
reader may find helpful, at least suggestive, in his 
own town. The essential matter for all of us is to 
become more and more of surveyors ourselves ; it is 



398 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

to vivify and rationalise our own experience, which 
is always so far unique ; as well as to compare and 
co-ordinate our observations and ideas with those of 
others. Such growing knowledge is the true and 
needed preparation towards the needed uplift of 
Country and Town. 

As this ever fresh and fascinating interest in our 
immediate surroundings gains upon our too common 
apathy, the citizen upon his daily walk and in his 
long familiar streets may gradually or suddenly 
awaken to a veritable revelation that of the past 
and present interest, and the unexhausted possibilities 
of the everyday social scenes around him, as of their 
actual or latent beauty also. The business and 
industrial toiler, the mechanical voter and member, 
the administrative mandarin and routinist who all, 
to do them bare justice, have been vaguely striving, 
however sunless and indoor their lights, to make 
something a little better of our paleotechnic disorder 
may thus be rejuvenated, one and all, aroused, 
enlivened by a fresh vision, the literal " fresh eye " of 
art, the open eye of science also. The vital union and 
co-ordination of these two eyes is the characteristic of 
the neotchnic order, the fuller event of which only our 
sluggishness or hopelessness delays. The discourage- 
ment and cynicism, so common in the past and passing 
generation, and still affected by the rising one, are not 
normal attitudes of mind, but are easily explained 
even cured. Why the insufficiency of nineteenth- 
century science ? Mostly too static and analytic 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 399 

to come in touch with art. Why that of artistic and 
other romantic movements ? Too retrospective to 
come in touch with science. Each involved the 
failures of both in social and civic application, hence 
their too general lapse into personal preoccupations, 
or into mechanical and commercial ones. But now 
the sciences are becoming evolutionary in their views 
and presentments, more co-ordinated and social in 
their applications. The artist is escaping from the 
mere futile endeavour to reconstruct the shell and 
semblance of the vanished past : he sees that as its 
artistic virtues lay in its expression of the vital 
emotions, ideals, and ideas of its day, so it must be 
his task to express the best of his own age, and with 
its fresh resources, its new constructive methods. As 
scientist and artist make these advances, they begin 
also to understand and trust each other ; a true co- 
operation begins. And as this incipient union of 
science and art becomes realised, our discouragement 
and our cynicism abate ; before long our inhibitions 
and paralysis will pass away. Thus a new age, a new 
enthusiasm, a new enlightenment are already dawning ; 
and with these the Civic Revivance is at hand. 

Regional Survey and their applications Rural 
Development, Town Planning, City Design these 
are destined to become master-thoughts and practical 
ambitions for the opening generation, not less fully 
than have been Business, Politics, and War to the 
past, and to our passing one. In and through these 



400 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

constructive activities, all the legitimate and effective 
elements which underlie business, politics, and even 
war in its best aspects, yet in which these so sadly 
corne short, can be realised, and each increasingly. 
Already, for thinking geographers here and there, 
for artists and engineers, for town planners also, the 
neotechnic order is not only becoming conscious, but 
generalised, as comprehensively geotechnic ; and its 
arts and sciences are coming to be valued less as 
intellectual pleasures, attainments, distinctions, and 
more in the measure in which they can be organised 
into the geographical service, the regional regenera- 
tion of Country and Town. 

In all these ways we are learning to realise more 
fully the spirit of our city or town ; and we thus are 
able to distinguish, beyond the general improvements 
more or less common to all cities of our day, those 
characteristic developments of which our opening 
future may be best capable, and by which the spirit 
we have learned to value may be yet more fully and 
worthily expressed. 

Such regeneration is not merely nor ultimately 
geographic alone : it is human and social also. It is 
eugenic, and, educational eupsychic, therefore, above 
all. Eutopia is thus every whit as realisable an ideal 
for the opening Neotechnic phase of the Industrial 
Age as has been that of " material progress," that of 
" industrial development " of the existing black and 
squalid Kakotopias amid which the Paleotechnic 



SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 401 

disorder is now approaching its close. Upon its ashes 
the planting of future forests is already here and 
the re beginning ; among its worst slums, upon their 
buried filth and decay, our children are already 
rearing roses. As this material and intellectual re- 
construction, this social and civic transition, becomes 
rea ised by the rising generation, it will proceed more 
and more rapidly ; and this whether the cynic relax 
or harden, whether he come with us or bide. His 
owji recovery from the blight of disappointments 
above reviewed, his revival from their prolonged chill, 
is rot to be despaired of. Contemptuous as he may 
be in this day of small things, his tone will change 
wherever this better civic and social order can show, 
beyond its first weedings and sowings, some earnest 
of flower or fruit. 

So too with the politician, and of each and every 
colour. For the ideals of each school, the aims of 
each party each richer than its rivals admit in men 
of insight and good-will could not have arisen with- 
out some foundations on the past or present life of 
our communities, some outlook towards their con- 
tinuance. In that fuller vision and interpretation 
of the past and present life of cities, towards which 
we are searching as students in civics, that last-born 
of the sciences, yet before long to be the most fruit- 
ful and in the clearer forecasts and preparations of 
the possible future lying before each community, 
which the corresponding art of civics will also bring 

within reach the prevalent discords of parties and 

26 



402 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

occupations may be increasingly resolved. Competi- 
tion may be mitigated, often transformed into co- 
operation. Even hostilities and egoisms may be 
raised into rivalries towards the promotion of the 
common weal ; and thus find their victory and 
success and self-realisation through service. In civic 
science the task of each acquires a directness of 
responsibility exceeding that of politics, with a signifi- 
cance and a value which monetary economics missed. 
Though in an age of science we no longer expect that 
abstract level of perfection which has been dreamed 
and phrased by the age of politics, as it waxed and 
waned, we are compensated by a more concrete vision 
that of opening possibilities, of social betterment 
and uplift day by day, year by year, generation by 
generation of folk, work, and place together. 

Within these actual conditions, social harmonies 
may now and increasingly be composed ; harmonious 
endeavours recalling, even exceeding, the aspirations 
of the past, and carried up to and beyond its historic 
heights of achievement. 

Such are the Eutopias already dawning here, 
there, everywhere. Despite the present set-back, of 
European war, with its more than materially destruc- 
tive consequences, the generation thus coming into 
activity must henceforward all the more apply its 
best minds to re-synthetic problems, to reconstructive 
tasks. Hence the tangled Evolution of Cities will 
be more clearly unravelled and interpreted, the 
Revivance of Cities more effectively begun. 



SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS 

PERSONAL COLLECTION 

THE reader should begin (1) with his own city or borough, and 
with any others familiar to him in youth, in holiday or in travel; 
(2) with historic and modern cities which for other reasons, 
historic, economic, cultural, may interest him. For each, its 
guide-books and other literature, old and new, should be sought 
for. Old plans, engravings, photographs, etc., should be col- 
lected. Teachers will find their pupils profit, and even help 
beyond their anticipations. 

GENERAL READING 

The Public Libraries now collect civic literature. General 
and special works of travel and architecture, of exploration and 
excavation, rich in illustrations of ancient and classic, medieval 
and Renaissance cities, are needed to form one's mental gallery 
of the cities of different periods. For the spirit of cities, 
Ruskin on Venice, Florence and Amiens, and R. L. Stevenson 
on Edinburgh, etc., have furnished examples and impulse to 
many later writers. 

The Magazines, especially the American, now increasingly 
deal with civic questions, and such articles are often well 
illustrated. 

The publications of the Fabian Society contain papers and 
suggestions of value. Their "New Heptarchy Series" (No. 1, 
Muiiicipalisation by Provinces) partly anticipates the sugges- 
tion of Chapter II. 

403 26* 



404 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

HISTORICAL STUDY 

As a good introduction to the study of towns and cities may 
be recommended Town Study, by Miss Penstone (National 
Society, Westminster). The " Historic Cities " Series (Mac- 
millan) contains many excellent volumes. For medieval cities 
Camillo Sitters Die Stddtebau (French translation as IS Art de 
Bdtir des Villes) is specially recommended. Here, too, the 
romancer is of service : Readers Cloister and the Hearth is a 
standard example. 

TOWN SURVEYS 

Survey of the Life and Labour of the People of London, by 
the Right Hon. Charles Booth, etc. (12 vols., maps. Macmillan). 
Its observant study of streets and quarters, and of the con- 
ditions and life of their inhabitants, may be supplemented by 
fiction, indeed, since Dickens as notably Whiteing's No. 6 
John Street. 

French Literature is here rich ; e.g. Zola's Les Trois Villes : 
Paris, Rome, Lourdes, for the interaction of city and citizen. 
Charpen tier's opera of Louise is also noteworthy in this regard. 

Returning to surveys, the smallest example, compact and 
suggestive, is Marr's Survey of Manchester, with map (Sheratt 
& Hughes, Is.). Rowntree's Poverty and Unemployment (Mac- 
millan) are of great importance. The relation of economic to 
civic studies is unusually grasped in an excellent introductory 
manual, Economics, Descriptive and Theoretical, by Margaret 
M'Killop and Mabel Atkinson (London, Allman, 3s. 6d.). 
American Surveys are, however, most abundant. See list of 
Russell Sage Institute. 

HOUSING 

Thompson's Housing Handbooks (King & Son) are invaluable 
for reference. 

GARDEN CITIES 

Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities (Garden City Association, 
Is.) has given great impulse to this movement; a fruitful 



SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS 405 

" Eutopia," now actively continued by the Garden Cities and 
Town Planning Association, with its excellent monthly journal 
of that name. Mr Culpin's Garden Cities Up to Date may 
here be recommended. 

TOWN PLANNING 

HorsfalPs Example of Germany (Sheratt & Hughes, Is.). Of 
notable stimulus to opinion and municipal action and legislation, 
Nettleford's Report (on German cities) to the Town Council of 
Birmingham (Is.) is a good example of municipal inquiry. As 
also advancing municipal awakening, the work and publications 
of the " National Housing and Town Planning Association " 
(Leicester: Henry D. Aldridge, Sec.) must be mentioned, as 
notably Aldridge's Case for Town Planning. Their town- 
planning congresses in city after city, as also their town-planning 
tours to Continental cities, are warmly recommended. 

Report of Town Planning Conference (R.I.B.A., 1910) is well 
worth consulting. The Introductory Address of its President, 
the Right Hon. John Burns, should be read, its sections noted, 
and papers consulted. The writer may mention his Civic 
Survey of Edinburgh, with ample illustrations by F. C. Mears 
See also City Surveys before Town Planning (Sociological 
Society), and for its application, e.g. 'Saffron Walden Regional 
Survey, by F. C. Maynard and Mabel Barker (The Museum, 
Saffron Walden, 1912). 

The Catalogue of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition 
(Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 6d.) affords aid to the further 
study of civics, with materials as yet available. Besides the 
architectural and municipal journals, which increasingly con- 
tain town-planning articles, may be recommended the Town 
Planning Review, edited by Prof. Adshead and R. Abercrombie 
(Liverpool : School of Civic Design). Town Planning, by 
Raymond Unwin (Batsford, Holborn, 21s.), is of technical 
mastery, wide knowledge and appreciation. Its treatment of 
architecture and town planning, as no separate arts for art's 
sake but as the expression of a worthy civic life in the past, 



406 CITIES IN EVOLUTION 

and of the civic renascence in the present, make this as yet 
the central work of the civic movement. Of foreign manuals 
Dr Werner Hegernann's Der Stddtebau (two vols. published), 
Berlin, 1911 and 1913, may be especially recommended. Ray and 
KimbalPs bibliography, City Planning, Harvard University Press, i 
1918, may be useful. 

American town planning literature is also increasingly rich 
in the qualities above commended ; as notably the general works 
of C. Mulford Robinson, the special reports on cities such as 
those of John Nolan, the designs of the Olmsteds and of 
younger men rapidly coming on. 

For a comprehensive discussion of a city, from the standpoint 
of its parks, gardens and cultural institutes especially, may be 
mentioned the writer's City Development (Outlook Tower, 
Edinburgh, 21s.). Later outlines of the writer's teaching may 
be found in Sociological Papers, and The Sociological Review 
(Sociological Society), also in University Extension Syllabuses of 
Lectures on Cities and Civics (University of London), and in 
various reprints (Outlook Tower, Edinburgh). 



INDEX 



Abstract and concrete views, neces- 
sity of latter, 13-16, 21-24. 
politics v. concrete civics, 132-4. 
Adam, Robert, architect, 120-1, "124. 
Esthetic factor as symptom of, 
and aid to efficiency and 
health, 89-94. 
American cities, improvements in, 

232-6. 

lown designing, 172-3. 
Anstotle,founder of civic studies, 1 3. 

synoptic vision of city, 336-7. 
Australia, town planning in, 

Bartholomew's Atlas of England 

and Wales, 21-2. 
Budgets, Vital, as opposed to 

money wages, 71. 

Burnham, Mr, plan for Chicago, 48. 
Bye-law Streets, 151. 

Canadian cities and land specula- 
tion, 256-8. 

Cardiff as regional metropolis, 275. 
Chelsea Past and Possible, 367- 

375- 

Crosby Hall, 374. 

Ciiiderella, the modern, 125-9, 142. 
Cries, Evolution of, as a study in 

contemporary social evolution, 

i-5- 

Science of, 267-70. 

Spirit of, 359-75- 

Study of, 313-28. 

Survey of, 329-38. 

is preparatory to town-planning 

schemes, 344-58. 

Cities and Town Planning Exhibi- 
tion, 12. 

it Ghent, 263-90. 

scheme and aims of, 259-63. 

ases of as exemplified by Edin- 
burgh, 290-4. 



Citizen, Woman as, 83, 143. 
Citizenship and Travel, 161-75. 
City regions, see Conurbations. 
City Survey for Town Planning, 

339-5 8 : 
and Exhibition, Outline Scheme 

of, 355-8. 
City-groups and Regional Survey, 

25-45. 

Civic Exhibition, uses of, 210. 
Exhibitions and Town Planning, 

246-94. 

Observatory and Laboratory, 
Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 
321-7. 
Studies, difficulties of approach 

to, 3-9. 

Survey of Edinburgh, 255-8. 
v. political attitude in London 

affairs, 21-4. 
Volunteering, 101-2. 
Civics, absence of interest in, 18- 

19. 

and Eugenics, 388-92. 
Laboratory, 258. 
plea for education in, 296-312. 
School of, 312, 366-75. 
as synthetic Social Study, 266-7. 
and Town Planning, 298-312. 
Cologne, town-planning visit to, 

180-7. 
Conservation of Nature, arguments 

for, 94-101. 
" Constructive Consols," Social 

Finance, 384-8. 

Conurbations, or City groups of 
Lancashire, Yorkshire, Mid- 
lands, S. Wales, Tyne Valley, 
Clyde-Forth, France, Germany, 
United States, 43-49. 
Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd., 138- 

9, 156. 
Crosby Hall, Chelsea, 374. 



407 



408 



CITIES IN EVOLUTION 



Docks, Frankfort, 196-8. 

London, 216-8. 
Dublin, Cities and Town Planning 

Exhibition at, 258. 
Civic Exhibitions, 294. 
Town - Planning Competition, 

262-3, 2 94. 

Durham, as example of change 
from medieval to modern in- 
dustrial conditions, 64-5. 
Diisseldorf, town-planning visit to, 
188-91. 

Edinburgh, Civic Survey of, 13, 

137, 255-7. 

Eighteenth-century Town Plan- 
ning in, 1 20. 

and Glasgow contrasted, 40-1. 
Industrial future of, 377-8. 
Outlook Tower Committee for 

Open Spaces, 102. 
School of Sociology, 15. 
Encyclopaedia Civica, 320-1. 
Exhibitions in general, 246-8. 

Civic, 248-50. 

Exhibition, Cities and Town Plan- 
ning, London, 250-7. 
Crosby Hall, 257. 
Dublin, 258-9. 
Edinburgh, 258. 
Ghent, 259. 

Frankfort, new docks as master- 
piece of town planning, 196-8. 

Garden Cities Association, recent 

report, 225. 

Garden Cities movement, 154-6. 
Garden Suburbs and Garden Cities, 

recent developments, 223-7. 
Geographical Control, illustrated 

in Cities and Town Planning 

Exhibition, 280-1. 
German city, lessons to bejearned 

from it, 213-21. 
organisation and its lessons, 192- 

221. 
Germany, town-planning tour in, 

176-91. 

Civic Exhibitions in, 249-50. 
Ghent, Cities and Town Planning 

Exhibition at, 263. 
Gibbon, historian, 120, 



Haussmann and Paris lay-out, 
Health Congresses, 32-3, 43. 
Heptarchy and modern city-groi 

41-2. 
High dwellings to be discoura^ 

206-7. 
Hors" fall's Example of Germi 

1.75- 
Housing, indifference of people to, 

132-8 

movement, 144-60. 
Housing 'and Town Planning as 

a business proposition, 378-92. 
in recent progress, 222-45. 
Howard, Mr Ebenezer, and Garden 

City Association, 154-6. 
Hygiene, Municipal, and its results 

for property owners, 150-1. 

Ideal conceptions necessary for 

every science, 86-8. 
India, City Planning and imperial 

policy, 240. 
Industrial Age, Paleotechnic and 

Neotechnic, 60-83. 
International Exhibitions, 246-94. 

" Lancaston " as name for Urban 

Lancashire, 35. 
London, government of, 21. 

Docks extension as example of 

bad planning, 216-18. 
Greater, 25-29, 32, 45. 
and the Provinces as Spending- 

town and Earning-towns, 44. 
Town Planning Exhibition, 1910, 

251-6. 

Lyons, Exposition de la Vie Ur- 
baine, 291-2. 

Metropolitan improvements in 

Athens, Dublin, England 

generally, 227-32. 
Mews, needed abolition of, 105. 
Middle Ages, Town Planning in, 

10-13. 

Model tenements, 151-2. 
Money Wages and Vital Budget, 

71, uo-i. 

Nature Study and Town Study 

334-6. 
Neotechnic and Paleotechnic phases 

of Industrial Age, 60-83. 



INDEX 



409 



Nolen, Dr John, American town 
planner, 173. 

Norway, significance of in Neo- 
technic industry, 51-5? 81. 

"Nothing Gained by Overcrowd- ; 
ing," Mr Raymond Unwin's 
admirable tract, 160. 

O:tavia Hill, Miss, housing im- 
provements, 149-50. 
Olmsted, American town planner, 

173- 
Oatlook Tower, Edinburgh, as Civic 

Observatory and Laboratory, j 

321-7. 

and Regional Survey, 336. 
and Spirit of City, 366. 

Pjileotechnicand Neotechnic phases 
of Industrial Age, 60-83. 

Paris, Exposition de la Ville de | 
(Pavilion of the City of), 248-9, 
263. 

" Parish Pump," and water supply, 

42-3- 

Piranesi, etcher, 120. 

Politicians, as concerned with ab- 
stractions, 20-2. 

Population-map and its uses, 25-45. 

" Practical man," his philosophy 
futilitarian, 89. 

" Reform Bill Atlases" of 1832 and 

expansion of towns, 208. 
Regional Survey, 340-58. 

needed for City-groups, 25-45. 
Regnier, Henri de, on great cities, 

167. 
Rey, M. Augustin, architect and 

town planner, 179. 
Robinson, Mulford, American town 

planner, 173. 
Rowntree, F. Seebohm, as social 

surveyor, 74, iio-i, 340-1. 

Science of Cities, 267-70. 

Sitte, Camillo, appreciation of 

medieval city as a whole, 200-2. 
Slums, 116-141. 
Social Finance, 384-8. 
Sociological Society and Civic 

Exhibitions, 251. 



Spirit of Cities, 359-75. 

Stuebben, Dr, German authority 
on town planning, 200. 

Suburban communications and 
suburban development as les- 
sening congestion in centre, 
158. 

Survey of Cities, 266. 

of Edinburgh, 13, 137,255-7. 

Surveys of Cities as reinterpreting 
Place, Work, and People, 
282-6 

Regional and Civic, uses of, 
32-5. 

Tenements in Scotland, 132-141. 
Town Planning Act, Mr Burns's, 

207-8. 

Town Planning and Civic Exhibi- 
tions, 246-94. 

and Civics, 298-312. 

Education for, 295-312. 

Extensions and Open Spaces, 
96-101 

and Housing as a business pro- 
position, 378-92. 

Institute, 298. 

in Middle Ages, 10-13. 

and Public Health, 32-4, 50. 

Tour in Germany, 176-91. 

Ulm, example of wise town plan- 
ning, 204. 

Umvin, Mr Raymond, architect 
and town planner, 156, 160. 

Utopias, indispensable to social 

thought, 72-3. 

paleotechnic and neotechnic, 74- 
6. 

Veblen, Thorstein, American econo- 
mist, 117-8. 
Vital Budget v. Money Wages, 71, 

IIO-I. 

Vivian, Mr Henry, M.P., leader of 
Co-partnership Housing move- 
ment, 139. 

War and struggle for existence 

interpreted, 82-3. 
Woman as citizen, 83, 143. 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 

NEILL AND CO., LTD., 

EDINBURGH. 



LONDON 

BY 

SIR LAURENCE L. GOMME, F.S.A. 



This important work is written with all the historical 
conviction of this prominent authority. As late Chief 
C.erk of the L.C.C., Sir Laurence Gomme had ample 
scope to gratify his interest in the antiquities of the 
Metropolis, and the present work is a statement of what 
he deduces. His aim is to show the continuity of 
London history from the Roman times, and the effect 
ol that continuity on the capital itself to-day. One 
original aspect of the historical question is the way in 
which he shows that the Roman idea continued through 
the centuries when London was under English kings. 
This he endorses with much new evidence and new 
reading of old evidence. Apart from this point, there 
is much to stimulate enthusiasm for London, and much 
valuable metropolitan lore set forth in historical detail. 

The volume is abundantly illustrated in a special 
photogravure reproduction with twenty-four full-page 
views of old London and portraits of those connected 
with it, whilst it has over a hundred other pictures. 

"This able and learned book." Truth. 

" Londoners who love their city will be grateful to Sir Laurence 
G ;>mme for this stimulating and suggestive book." New Statesman. 

Accompanied with a large number of unique illustrations and plates. 
Demy %vo. Cloth. ?S. 6d. net; postage inland, $d. extra. 



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